Risk factors, clinical features and outcome of treatment of work related musculoskeletal disorders in on-site clinics among IT companies in India

Workrelated musculoskeletal disorders among the IT professional is a common area of concern worldwide. This study was taken up to analyze the prevalence of risk factors, clinical features and outcome of treatment in onsite clinics in vaious information technology companies in India. Result revealed poor office ergonomics (54%), lack of keyboard tray (25%), lack of mouse tray (35%), lack of foot rest (60%), improper monitor height (80%) were the major self reported risk factors. Major identified MSD were Myofascial Pain Syndrome (49.20%), Thoracic outlet syndrome (25.02%), Fibromyalgia syndrome (8.5%). Majorly affected body regions were neck (64.9%), shoulder (42.1%), lower back (56.5%) and thigh (34.2%). The results were comparable with the literature. Feedback of the participants also revealed most of the participants were well satisfied with SHARAN's protocol.     

Effect of ergonomic and workstyle risk factors on work related musculoskeletal disorders among IT professionals in India

'Workstyle' can be described as a mechanism by which ergonomic and psychosocial risk factors interact to affect the development, exacerbation and/or maintenance of upper limb pain and functional limitations. Workstyle is associated with the increase in the work demand. In today's life use of computer in the workplace is very common and it causes to increase the work demand among the workers who are working with computer. As work demand increase, according to the characteristic of workstyle, risk of the development of musculoskeletal disorders also increased. This study aimed at to findout the association between ergonomics risk factors, workstyle and WRMSD. Two hundred IT professionals participated in this study. Result revealed that most prevalenet body regions were lower back (20%), Upper back (16%) and shoulder (14%). Study result says that there is a positive association between workstyle score with musculoskeletal pain (r=0.85). Also it revealed that posture and regional pain is associated (r=0.62), per day use of computer and musculoskeletal pain (r=0.46), micro breaks and pain (r=0.87) and productivity and the pain (r=0.95). This study further validates these observations and extends support for the assessment of working postures and workstyle behaviors during the design of WMSD treatment.     

Injury prevention in physiotherapists--a scientific review

This review targeted all research previously conducted on the topic of musculoskeletal disorders and injury among physiotherapists, with a particular focus on studies that had examined individual, physical and psychosocial risk factors and provided suggestions or recommendations to prevent such injuries. Scientific literature published in English languages was searched using electronic way. A total of 17 appropriate studies were located and examined, most of which had focused on the prevalence of musculoskeletal disorders/pan or any other injury. From the review, it was shown that major risk factors among the physiotherapist were manual therapy, repetitive movement, awkward and static posture, physical load, lifting and transferring, treating large number of patients treating in a single day, working while injured, years of experience. The preventive measures that described in these literatures were awareness of reporting of injury, use of less manual therapy, proper exercise, formulation of new devices, intervention at the level of workplace, work schedule allocation, proper training, ongoing risk assessment and control.     

No landward movement: examining 80 years of population migration and shoreline change in Louisiana

Population and Environment - Louisiana lost nearly 5,000 km2 of its coastal land area due to relative sea level rise (including local, regional, and global factors driving relative sea level...     

Collaborative filtering for massive multinomial data

Content recommendation on a webpage involves recommending content links (items) on multiple slots for each user visit to maximize some objective function, typically the click-through rate (CTR) which is the probability of clicking on an item for a given user visit. Most existing approaches to this problem assume user's response (click/no click) on different slots are independent of each other. This is problematic since in many scenarios CTR on a slot may depend on externalities like items recommended on other slots. Incorporating the effects of such externalities in the modeling process is important to better predictive accuracy. We therefore propose a hierarchical model that assumes a multinomial response for each visit to incorporate competition among slots and models complex interactions among (user, item, slot) combinations through factor models via a tensor approach. In addition, factors in our model are drawn with means that are based on regression functions of user/item covariates, which helps us obtain better estimates for users/items that are relatively new with little past activity. We show marked gains in predictive accuracy by various metrics.