Results Pretest The dependent t test for paired samples showed no significant differences (p = 0.1705) between measured and manually reconstructed exposure to the knee time intervals. Further analyses

showed a strong coefficient of determination for both measurements and video-recordings (R 2 = 0.8913). Only for the steep-roofing work task, a high percentage of “knee-supporting working position” (Jensen et al. 2000b) was automatically categorised as “standing” and therefore had to be modified manually for analysis. After exclusion of this task, the coefficient of determination between the two methods improved further (R 2 = 0.9978). Validation study Figure 3 depicts the time spent in knee-straining postures (unsupported kneeling, supported kneeling, sitting on heels, squatting, and crawling) during an entire work shift, both originally measured and reconstructed, for each of the 14 subjects from the three different occupations. BAY 11-7082 in vivo The average time spent in knee-straining MI-503 concentration postures was 10.02 ± 6.68 % per work shift for the measurements and 10.50 ± 6.97 % for the reconstructions. The absolute deviations between measured and reconstructed daily knee strain (time percentages)

ranged from 0.06 to 2.86 % with an average deviation of 0.48 %. An equal distribution of small over- and underestimations was found (57–43 %, respectively). Thus, the results of both methods seem to be very similar, and there is no visible trend for a false estimation of the degree of exposure by the reconstruction method. Fig. 3 Pilot study: comparison of measured (white) and “reconstructed” (black) exposure to the knee: time RG7420 intervals spent in knee-straining postures during an entire work shift (n = 14) in three occupations (subject ID 1–8 service technicians, ID 9–12 ramp agents, ID 13–14 nursery nurses) This apparent similarity is supported by the results of the Wilcoxon signed-rank test, which shows no significant differences between the

two methods for any of the knee-straining postures; p values ranged from 0.21 (sitting on heels) to 1.00 (crawling), with p = 0.27 for knee-straining postures in total. For Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient, very good correlations were found between both methods for all analysed forms of exposure. The calculated values were between 0.90 (squatting) and 0.98 (supported kneeling), with 0.97 for knee-straining postures in total and p < 0.0001 for all values. Main study: postural exposure to the knee Figure 4 shows the distributions of daily time intervals of the analysed postures over all examined work shifts. According to these results, unsupported kneeling was the most widely used knee posture in our sample (median 11.4 %, e.g. 55 min in a typical work shift of 480 min), followed by supported kneeling (15 min/480 min shift), sitting on heels (5 min), squatting (3 min), and crawling (0 min). The total mean exposure to the knee (=100 %) consisted mainly of unsupported kneeling (51.