Welcome to the first OBEL Blog post! In this post we share our Blog purpose and goals so that you know what to expect and what to keep an eye out for in future posts.
OBEL conducts use-inspired research and development to help us learn more about preventing costly musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs). In addition to our research, members of OBEL participate in organizations including the Association of Canadian Ergonomists (ACE), the International Association of Ergonomics (IEA), the Ontario Kinesiology Association (OKA), the Canadian Kinesiology Alliance (CKA), and the OBEL director also serves as a scientific editor for the widely read journal Applied Ergonomics. As a result, OBEL is well positioned to contribute to and to be well-informed about current research and emerging issues in ergonomics. We will use the Blog to share those contributions and learnings with you, making it easier for you to stay well-informed too!
Our goal is to post every two weeks. We hope to grow awareness about new ergonomics research and to provide a platform to debate and discuss emerging ideas. Blog posts will be written by OBEL team members, including undergraduate students, graduate students and research staff, where each will bring a a unique perspective. We may even have a guest post from time-to-time from leading researchers and practitioners in our field, so stay tuned.
You can expect our posts to be clear, concise and quick to read. Posts will range from about 300 to 2,500 words so that you can quickly enjoy a post over a few sips of coffee or during a brief reprieve between a stream of Zoom meetings. Posts will focus on topics broadly related to primary and secondary prevention of work-related MSDs. For example, posts may discuss the use of digital human modeling for ergonomics, the use of functional testing (pre/post hire/return-to-work), or we may highlight research papers or presentations describing new MSD risk assessment tools. We may also post conference round-ups to share learnings from conferences that we attend around the globe.
Thinking about our next post, did you know that Amazon has been busy building a team of some of the best and brightest in ergonomics? This may be a result of former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s final letter to shareholders where he described the need for an obsession on ergonomics! In our next post we’ll dive into “How Amazon uses digital human modeling to inform ergonomics”. We look forward to seeing you next time when we review a new paper published in IISE Transactions on Occupational Ergonomics and Human Factors written by Drs. Almosnino & Cappelletto, research ergonomists’ at Amazon.
We hope you will enjoy our posts. If you have comments, thoughts or feedback, we’d love to hear from you ! Follow and chat with us on Twitter.