WORKER'S REVOLUTION
Tai Chi, Chinese, characters, and natural human rhythms are inspirations for Simon Hsiang, who uses avatars to study movement and its repercussions for workers.
Written by Kippra D. Hopper
Tai Chi, the ancient Chinese alphabet and natural human rhythms are the fascinating inspirations for Simon Hsiang, Ph.D., who uses his cultural and academic backgrounds to study human movement. A native of Taipei, Taiwan, and an industrial engineer, Hsiang is researching the movements and sub-movements especially of workers in material handling jobs in which lifting is required, often resulting in lower back pain and injuries.
In any industrial setting in the United States, lower back pain is the No. 1 reason for workers’ compensation claims. While the modern United States economy is overall service-oriented, Hsiang is interested in distribution center jobs, which historically are preceded by assembly lines where spinal loading is the human price for doing the work.
Assembly lines began in the United States first in slaughterhouses, where workers would take on various individual tasks required for processing meat. Henry Ford and the building of his Model T started an evolution in the United States economy toward more and more assembly line work, in which the motion and time of all jobs were standardized.
After interviewing generations of Detroit automobile assembly line workers, Hsiang learned that the workers stood for hours doing the same tedious tasks with the same repeated motions. They hated their jobs because they felt that they became part of the machine and were owned by the machine’s pace. Now, 100 years after those first assembly lines developed, less than 10 percent of the jobs in the United States are manufacturing-related with such production methods. Today’s distribution center jobs require such assembly methods in packaging, labeling and sending products to consumers but are not standardized as past jobs were.
An example of a distribution center is seen in the methods used to build and distribute computers, made of various and different components. With a national debate taking place regarding the outsourcing of jobs from workers in the United States to cheaper laborers in other countries, Hsiang points out that United States distribution center jobs never will be outsourced because of their necessity for today’s e-commerce and deconsolidated supply chains. In the United States, the numbers of distribution centers are increasing. In the global economy, various components are made in various countries and then are assembled together to make a final product. The gathering of these components and the distribution of final products require distribution center work, which, Hsiang says, carries with it inventory and scheduling nightmares. A theme seen in advertising and a basic tenet of industrial engineering is the idea that on-time performance is everything.
“Beyond scheduling and inventory issues, in this entire process, a very big problem exists in determining how to pay workers for such varied job tasks and how to charge customers for products that are similar but not always identical, such as is the case with computers or PC markets,” he says. “We need to figure out how to allow people reasonable ways to maintain production and performance, making the workplace more flexible and humane.”
With an avatar, which is a computer-generated human dummy or mannequin on screen, Hsiang is documenting and quantifying human movement by simulating particular job tasks. “Obviously, a way exists to calibrate and to document how people move or how people work.” Attempting to coordinate the different motions and patterns involved in human movement to his own avatar, Hsiang first borrowed from two ancient activities of his native culture, the writing of Chinese characters and the practice of Tai Chi, an Asian martial art.
Showing the delicately written Chinese characters, Hsiang explains, “Every Chinese character is done by stroke, a motion pattern done in two-dimensional fashion through three-dimensional coordination. In calligraphy, or writing by hand, a certain order exists: the writing always is done left to right, always top to bottom and always with a structural order that is based on our anatomy. If I am a right-handed person, pulling something left to right allows me to see the character at the same time I am writing it. I would say the same things about our motion patterns. If I have my first steps start from the left, most likely I will turn to the right, all based on functional anatomy and motor intelligence.”
Tai Chi, a long practiced Chinese martial art, emphasizes certain sequences or routines in movement. Tai Chi is based on balance at the core, or the idea of yin/yang. Through Tai Chi practice, one can achieve smooth body movement from the inside out. In Tai Chi, there is a core, or very simple guideline, that organizes body coordination. However, through Newtonian physics, a Western idea, we can determine a mathematical expression of postural balance and movement elegance, which combines an Eastern philosophy with the Western notion of efficiency to create a formula that describes how we move and work. The mixture becomes an intelligent motion coding system. Using the coding system, whoever reads the calligraphy of motion patterns can visualize the choreography of Tai Chi. We use these two strategies, along with the biomechanical traits of human movement, to create software that basically shows humans’ movement and sub-movement and for controlling or designing the avatar’s movement,” Hsiang explains. “Every job becomes a set of animations of how people work.”
Combining these ergonomic measurements with the knowledge that humans also experience biological rhythms, such as a circadian rhythms or women’s and men’s cyclical physical changes, Hsiang emphasizes that these functions work satisfaction and production.
“We would like to create a model that will show us how people fluctuate and how distribution centers can take accommodate and take advantage of those changes. If I take the difference over time, I see two interesting behaviors. When a person feels jumpy in their cycle, the jumpy performances go together. And, when a person is in a stable state of their cycle, the stable parts go together,” Hsiang says. “In other words, packages change day by day, but the frame of reference and variation of a worker who is performing certain jobs stays auto-correlated or history-dependent.”
Hsiang can measure combinations of factors, such as error rates, shipping mistakes and overall productivity, by measuring the worker’s contributions through scanning time of bar codes on the packages, and then he can find a reasonable combination to accommodate the fluctuations of the individuals.
“For example, after finding a worker is sore and his or her dexterity is affected, I can rotate that worker to a different task, or when a worker is in an especially productive mood, I can assign a particularly important job,” Hsiang says.
In coming up with this mixture of Eastern and Western thought to solve an industrial engineering and ergonomic problem, Hsiang says he began realizing that he should look at people not based on an average. “There are no average people, and there are no average performances, so we’re looking at a higher order of statistics, which reflects that we are human. People fluctuate. Jobs fluctuate. Now I can find a way to let the fluctuations move in the same rhythm to achieve the best outcome, one of which is to decrease workplace injuries and workers’ compensation claims.”
Story produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing
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