A system for detecting hand-arm vibration in the use of portable shakers for olives harvesting

The mechanization of olive harvesting is very important both to reduce the costs ofproduction and to assure the oil quality because the manual harvest does not allow tooperate at the right time and also need a long period to be completed. The use of portableshakers, that are spreading more than others typologies, can give a solution to the problem.However, the use of such equipment may involve risk of exposure to hand-transmittedvibration. The aim of this study was to assess the level of exposure to hand-arm vibration ofthe operators using portable shakers (reference standards UNI EN ISO 5349-1:2004, ItalianLow Decree 81/2008). An effective approach would rather involve to equip the worker withsuitable instruments to monitor and analyze the vibration exposure, thus providing a valuableinformation to prevent health hazards. Recent wireless sensing and communicatingtechnologies can effectively be employed for such purpose. In such context, the presentresearch proposes an innovative system aimed at estimating the hand-arm exposure tovibration according to the Standard EN ISO 5349-1:2004. In particular the proposed systemis based on Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technology and involves the designof a compact wearable unit to be attached to the waist of the operator and a fixed station fordata storage and analysis. A commonly used model was evaluated performing both field andlaboratory tests.