Design and Development of a Novel Wearable System for Assessing the Biomechanical and Psychological Risk of the Healthcare Worker.

The state of emergency caused by Covid19 increased the risk of biomechanical and psychological problems among healthcare workers and assumed the need to implement a strategy to prevent these. Adopting tools for monitoring parameters related to the previously mentioned risks can be a valid solution to avoid or reduce work-related physical disorders and stress level. The present work describes the design of a multiparameter system for the hospital environment aimed to monitor the musculoskeletal effort and estimate the stress level required to the healthcare workers. The main challenge was to design a wearable system that does not obstacle or disturb the healthcare worker in his/her work activities. The final set-up is the result of a structured co-design in which doctors, nurses and therapists were involved in a focus group, in order to identify the user requirements considering the needs of each profession. The focus group also served to analyze the activities performed by each category of operators selected (nurse, physical therapist and doctors). An emerging key point was that the final device has to adapt to the healthcare operators' work routine without changing it or adding other tasks. In conclusion, the focus group allowed to collect user requirements to design a multicomponent wearable to monitor physical and mental wellbeing in healthcare workers.