Dumper Operator’s Workplace Risks: Preliminary Study
Authors: Papic Neda , Misita Mirjana , Spasojevic Brkic Vesna , Perišić Martina , Janev Nemanja 
Published: June 2024

The dumper vehicle is essential for carrying out material handling activities and they are the primary cause of fatal accidents at both construction and mining sites. According to earlier studies, the vast majority of these incidents are caused by the operator’s behaviour. On other side, it is evident that dumper operators are often taking awkward postures and most of them are subjected to high and medium levels of musculoskeletal disorders.Due that fact, the aim of this paper is directed towards preventing accidents and/or incidents in dumper’s operations that originate from the operator’s error and which could be mitigated by the ergonomic adjustment. Specifically, the purpose of this study is to utilize artificial neural networks in order predict the probability of incidents and accidents on the basis of dumper operators’ workplace ergonomic intervention.In this research 40 dumper’s operators participated. Survey started with the 39-item checklist, which is based on prior research and there has been noticed that questions with lowest percent of positive answers are questions related to seat and armrests, so factors such as the seat height adequacy, the seat height adjustability, the seat be horizontal adjustment, the seat back support, the seat lumbar support, armrests availability, armrests height, armrests adjustability, vibrations through the seat, vibrations from the equipment through the floor, vibrations from the equipment through the control devices, the seat attachment to the sub cabin, and possibility to recline and rotate the seat are considered as primary factors in the investigation of the ergonomic adjustment of the dumper operators’ workplace. Poor working conditions originating from organizational factors are also recognized as one of the important focuses of this research. The obtained data were statistically analysed. Surveyed dumper operators came from various age groups and with varied work experience periods in the current study. The research revealed that the average age and height of dumper operator is 36.33 years and 178.35 centimetres, respectively. Moreover, despite the fact that their average weight is 90.33 kg, these body measurements, unlike the others which followed a Gaussian distribution, regardless of the average value indicate that a substantial proportion of operators are overweight and weigh more than 110 kg. In addition, the vast majority of operators in this survey had less than ten years of experience. Regarding the machines, the age of examined dumpers was less than ten years.In order to reduce the likelihood of accidents/incidents and injuries at work resulting from poor seat design, this study uses questions that covers the most significant factors affecting the quality of the working conditions related to the seat and armrests in dumper’s cabin. Furthermore, neural network was trained to predict the likelihood of injuries based on 14 different responses related to the seat and armrest, as indicated by the research's finding that the questions to which respondents provided the worst responses concerned the cabin's seat and armrest. The training dataset consisted of 80% of the obtained data, while 10% was allocated for validation and the remaining 10% was reserved for testing purposes. Used network has one hidden layer with 12 neurons. The neural network underwent training for a total of 16 epochs. The correct classification of 92.5 percent of the data demonstrates a high degree of accuracy in predicting potential accidents/incidents on sites where dumpers operate.Conclusions from the study indicate the need for additional research into an ergonomically optimized workspace for dumper operators in terms of the possibility of resolving identified issues through the further anthropometric surveys and possible application of modern information technologies, such as the installation of sensors, monitoring, and similar solutions.The sample size is a limitation of this study, and additional data collection is ongoing. The proposal for additional research is to collect additional data to increase the reliability of the analysis, and possibly investigate other types of mining machines to determine if similar problems occur with them.