Exposure of Live-Line Workers to Magnetic Fields: A Dosimetric Analysis

Impact of neck posture and insulating stick use on neck disability in Korean line workers: a cross-sectional study

Background

Occupational neck disability is a prevalent issue, especially among line workers, who are often exposed to elevated levels of cervical ergonomic stress. The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of neck posture and insulating stick use on neck disability in a specific occupational group in Korea.

Methods

This cross-sectional study was conducted among 483 line workers in Gwangju and Jeonnam, Korea. Data were collected using the Neck Disability Index, Cervical Degenerative Index, and a structured questionnaire focusing on demographic and occupational factors. Logistic regression analysis was applied to determine the adjusted odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) for neck posture and factors related to neck disability.

Results

Neck disability prevalence was 17.2% among the participants. Multivariate logistic regression analysis showed that factors related to neck disability included age over 60 years (adjusted OR: 3.08; 95% CI: 1.63-5.83), depression (adjusted OR: 8.33; 95% CI: 3.85-18.00), a history of cervical trauma (adjusted OR: 2.13; 95% CI: 1.04-4.40), and radiological degenerative changes in the cervical spine (adjusted OR: 2.33; 95% CI: 1.26-4.33). In particular, the adjusted OR of neck disability among live-line workers was 2.10 (95% CI: 1.12-3.92) when compared with support workers (model 1). Other analysis models showed that use of insulating sticks for more than 10 hours per week (adjusted OR: 2.46; 95% CI: 1.32-4.61) and higher neck extension (adjusted OR: 2.98; 95% CI: 1.14-3.46) were significant work-related risk factors (model 2,3).

Conclusions

Neck posture, age, depression, cervical trauma history, degenerative changes in the cervical spine, and use of insulating sticks are significant risk factors for neck disability among line workers in Korea. These findings highlight the need to improve the working environment and reduce the burden of cervical ergonomic stress among line workers.

A fast tool for the parametric analysis of human body exposed to LF electromagnetic fields in biomedical applications

A numerical procedure for analyzing electromagnetic (EM) fields interactions with biological tissues is presented. The proposed approach aims at drastically reducing the computational burden required by the repeated solution of large scale problems involving the interaction of the human body with EM fields, such as in the study of the time evolution of EM fields, uncertainty quantification, and inverse problems. The proposed volume integral equation (VIE), focused on low frequency applications, is a system of integral equations in terms of current density and scalar potential in the biological tissues excited by EM fields and/or electrodes connected to the human body. The proposed formulation requires the voxelization of the human body and takes advantage of the regularity of such discretization by speeding-up the computational procedure. Moreover, it exploits recent advancements in the solution of VIE by means of iterative preconditioned solvers and ad hoc parametric Model Order Reduction techniques. The efficiency of the proposed tool is demonstrated by applying it to a couple of realistic model problems: the assessment of the peripheral nerve stimulation, performed in terms of evaluation of the induced electric field, due to the gradient coils of a magnetic resonance imaging scanner during a clinical examination and the assessment of the exposure to environmental fields at 50 Hz of live-line workers with uncertain properties of the biological tissues. Thanks to the proposed method, uncertainty quantification analyses and time domain simulations are possible even for large scale problems and they can be performed on standard computers and reasonable computation time. Sample implementation of the method is made publicly available at https://github.com/UniPD-DII-ETCOMP/BioMOR.