Track: Human Factors and Ergonomics

Abstract

The study is aimed to investigate the critical process of making furniture and work-related symptoms that contribute to ergonomic and noise hazard. The effectiveness of the current existing control measures are also will be identified. Furniture industry is a manufacturing industry that employs a large workforce. There are many cases of occupational health diseases reported in 2017 from manufacturing sector in Malaysia. The highest diseases reported are noise-induced hearing loss and Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSDs). Therefore, in this study, the focus is on the ergonomic and noise hazards in the furniture industry in Malaysia. The study will be done by using three methodologies. The methodologies are four-sections questionnaire or survey, direct observation using REBA, and direct measurement to measure the noise exposure level in the working place. The result shows that the critical process that contributed to ergonomics hazard are sanding, packaging, boring/drilling/threading/grinding, and edging/laminating/gluing process. All these four processes are also categorized under medium and high risk level for Rapid Entire Body Assessment (REBA) score. While the work-related symptoms that contribute to the ergonomic hazard are lower leg, foot, knees, lower back and forearm. Other than that, for noise hazard, the critical process that contributed the most are sanding and cutting (automatic) process. For noise measurement, both processes produces noise decibels higher than 90 dB(A), the permissible exposure level for 8 hours, where cutting (automatic) produces 91.43 dB(A) and sanding process is 90.00 dB(A). The work-related symptoms that contribute to the noise hazard are headache, explosion and ringing in ear. Apart from that, the company are still not effective enough in term of engineering control. In conclusion, furniture industry has shown that workers are exposed to ergonomic and noise hazard. Therefore, effective engineering control should be developed to control the hazard.