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Patrick Neumann is on a mission to change the way workplaces and work-systems are designed. "There is a fundamental disconnect between how our work-systems are designed and how people work within them, which is bad for employee health and the bottom line," says Neumann, a professor of mechanical and industrial engineering who specializes in ergonomics.

The scope of the problem he aims to solve is huge. Job-related injuries and illnesses cost the North American economy a staggering $250-billion or more a year, on par with the estimated financial cost of cancer. Occupational injuries - like chronic back pain, carpal tunnel syndrome and other repetitive strain injuries - account for about 75 per cent of that total (nearly $190-billion in medical and productivity costs).

Neumann believes that many of these work-related injuries could be prevented, productivity boosted and product quality improved if work systems were designed differently.

Earlier this year, he was awarded a prestigious NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplements (DAS) grant to create new simulation tools that will allow engineers and managers to model and build human factors such as learning, forgetting, fatigue and physical workload into the work systems they design.

Integrating human factors into the design helps an organization to more accurately predict how a new production system will actually perform in the real world. The failure to predict the consequences of the design in terms of employee overload, injuries, absenteeism and turnover has a major impact on the system’s overall efficiency, productivity and profitability. And the cost of retrofitting after the problems emerge is large.

Neumann's proactive approach not only reduces the risks of illness and injury, it can improve the system's overall performance and organizational productivity. "The earlier you intervene in design the cheaper. In the early stage you don't have people to observe, but you can simulate how people are likely to perform within the system and predict where you might have problems in order to come up with the optimal design," he explains.

In his consulting work with Volvo Powertrain in Sweden he used a work flow simulation tool to show that a hybrid diesel engine production system (a mixture of parallel dock and serial line designs) would result in better productivity and ergonomic health advantages than a pure serial line system.     

Thanks to the DAS grant, Neumann will develop sophisticated human factors software to enhance existing simulation tools and collaborate with organizational partners - such as auto parts and electronics manufacturers, and hospitals - to test and improve how they work in practice. In Canadian hospitals, faced with nursing shortages and high turnover rates, these tools could be used to design optimal work flow patterns for nurses to deliver care more effectively and with less strain.   

Once Neumann's software has proven its worth in the lab, he plans to work with a commercial simulation software company to get his software into widespread use by engineers who design work systems. "I'm being sneaky by trying to make the human problems technical problems, so that engineers will pick up on this and apply the scientific knowledge we have about human performance. I’m trying to change the way the world works in my own small way," he says.