Two-person or team lifting is a popular method for handling materials under awkward or heavy lifting conditions. While many guidelines and standards address safe lifting limits for individual lifting, there are no such limits for team lifting, and these lifts are poorly understood. The literature associated with team lifting offers some interesting paradoxes. Many studies have indicated that pe...

BACKGROUND Knee osteoarthritis (kOA) risk is increased by obesity and physical activities (PA) which mechanically stress the joint. We examined the associations of midlife kOA with body mass index (BMI) and activity exposure across adult life and their interaction. METHODS Data are from a UK birth cohort of 2597 participants with a clinical assessment for kOA at age 53. At ages 36, 43 and 53 ...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the risk factors for low back pain in hospital nurses, with particular emphasis on the role of specific nursing activities. METHODS A cross sectional survey of 2405 nurses employed by a group of teaching hospitals was carried out. Self administered questionnaires were used to collect information about occupational activities, non-occupational risk factors for back sym...

A biomechanical evaluation of the job-related stresses imposed upon a worker is a potential means of reducing the high incidence rates of manual material handling injuries in industry. A biomechanical model consisting of seven rigid links joined at six articulations has been developed for this purpose. Using data from cinematographic analysis of lifting motions the model calculates: (1) body po...

A study in lossless image compression using the lifting scheme is presented. We first suggest why lossless image compression is an important issue and the general idea behind lifting. A detailed approach to generating biorthogonal wavelets using the lifting scheme is provided, which is followed by a small example. The results from applying lifting to a variety of images are given in order to te...

Introduction: Although, there is a current regulatory framework for optimal manual handling of loads to preserve health conditions in the industrial sector, technical assessment and use certain instruments are still required diagnosis occupational hazards. This study aimed identify hazards associated with load industry workers estimate those resulting from postural stress. Methods: Fifty-two (5...

Lifting is a procedure for deriving strong valid inequalities for a closed set from inequalities that are valid for its lower dimensional restrictions. It is arguably one of the most effective ways of strengthening linear programming relaxations of 0–1 programming problems. Wolsey (1977) and Gu et al. (2000) show that superadditive lifting functions lead to sequence independent lifting of valid...

This paper presents a new wavelet family for lossless image compression by re-factoring the channel representation of the update-then-predict lifting wavelet, introduced by Claypoole, Davis, Sweldens and Baraniuk, into lifting steps. We name the new wavelet family as invertible update-then-predict integer lifting wavelets (IUPILWs for short). To build IUPILWs, we investigate some central issues...

This report reduces the total number of lifting steps in a three-dimensional (3D) double lifting discrete wavelet transform (DWT), which has been widely applied for analyzing volumetric medical images. The lifting steps are necessary components in a DWT. Since calculation in a lifting step must wait for a result of former step, cascading many lifting steps brings about increase of delay from in...