Muhamad Hafiz ZABIDI, Radin Zaid RADIN UMAR, Siby SAMUEL, Mohd Hanafi ANI, Malek HAMID
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1 Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400, UPM Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia.
* corresponding author (email: hazreen@upm.edu.my)
Page 12 – 16 | Vol. 3 No. 2 (2018) | Available online on 1 Dec 2018
Abstract
Agricultural activities in Malaysia is still laborious at large as numerous tasks are performed manually, including in the oil palm industry. The involvement of manual and energy-intensive activities for harvesting tasks in oil palm plantations partly limits its productivity. The manufacturing industry still involves manual tasks, however, exoskeleton systems are actively adopted to improve productivity and safety of operations involving human. Therefore, we postulate that they could also be applied in the agricultural industry. A challenge in adopting any commercially available exoskeleton system for harvesting oil palm trees is to match the system’s feature and the requirements of the harvesting task. Since manual harvesting requires extensive upper limb motion, therefore this study investigates the feasibility of using a passive upper limb exoskeleton system for manual harvesting activity. Electromyography (EMG) signal of the anterior deltoid muscle located at the shoulder was compared when carrying 2 kg, 4 kg and 5 kg loads with and without an upper limb exoskeleton system. The test involved tugging motion and holding the weights at arm’s length for 1 minute. EMG results indicate that the muscle activity was reduced when performing these exercises while donning the exoskeleton for all tested loads. Nonetheless, the exoskeleton design requires optimization to suit oil palm harvesting tasks so that the productivity and safety of manual oil palm harvesting activity can be enhanced.
Keywords
Exoskeleton, Muscle activity, EMG, Fatigue, Oil palm, Manual harvesting, Biomechanics
Acknowledgement
This study was supported by Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) through the Geran Putra-IPM
initiative (Project title: The Development of An Exoskeleton for Oil Palm Harvesting Activity) and
Fundamental Research Grant Scheme (Project title: A Biomechanical-based Approach to Improve Energy Expenditure in Manual Oil Palm Harvesting Activity).
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Human Factors & Ergonomics Journal (HFEJ), eISSN: 2590-3705 is the official Journal of Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Malaysia. The journal is published on a biannual basis. HFEJ aims to address current research in the field of Ergonomics in addition to the broad coverage of cognitive ergonomics, user experience, physical ergonomics and others such as transportation, industrial design and industrial engineering. HFEJ is a member of, and subscribes to the principles of the COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics), as such we only accept original work.