پردازش تحلیلی سلسله مراتب سیستم پشتیبانی تصمیم گیری فازی برای تجزیه و تحلیل پیش بینی خطر شغلی ایجاد درد شانه و گردن

This research provides an analytical tool, fuzzy decision support system (FDSS), to find the precedence of jeopardy in occupations spawning shoulder and neck pain (SNP), an important musculoskeletal disorder and the most ubiquitous pain complaint in an occupational environment. FDSS evaluates and prioritizes the relative importance of the imprecise, uncertain and vague nature of risk factors causing occupational SNP. The objective involves derivation of mechanical-, physical- and psychosocial-related risk categories using knowledge acquisition implemented by identifying the risk factors through literature analysis, conventional and concept mapping interviews with expert neurologists, orthopedists, psychologists and physiotherapists. Fuzzy analytic hierarchy process is applied as an evaluation tool to measure the significance of the risk factors in each occupation. The results indicate that the proposed system supplements SNP diagnosis experts with more precise key decision support information. This assists health care organizations to systematically identify appropriate occupations that grounds high risk for the occurrence of SNP and so the curative practices can be executed effectively.

A musculoskeletal disorder refers to conditions that involve the nerves, muscles and supporting structures of the body. The association between long term and short term exposure to different work environments plays a vital role in the incidence of musculoskeletal disorders. Now the increase in the use of visual display terminal (VDT) work, work above shoulder level, inclusive opportunities to acquire new knowledge and an increased amount of seated work have become common issues in any work environment. These lead to an important musculoskeletal disorder called SNP as studied by Sillanpää et al. (2003). SNP is the most common disease in the population acquired from an occupational environment. According to Pope, Silman, Cherry, Pritchard, and Macfarlane (2001) and Van der Windt Daniëlle et al. (2000) inability to work, loss of productivity, occupational illness and inability to carry out household activities are the sufferings due to SNP and can be a considerable burden to the patient as well as to society. SNP remains one of the primary occupational hazard classifications in the world with associated costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year. SNP has a strong, negative effect on the quality of life, and causes considerable personal suffering. In many countries every year worker’s SNP problems lead to time away from jobs and reduce the nation’s economic productivity. Risk factors that have been associated with occupational related SNP are numerous. These risk factors may be work-, and psychological-related or individual aspects. These risk factors are very likely not independent and some researchers have attempted to develop theories that describe their interactions (Kumar, 2001 and Marras, 2000). SNP occurs due to individual or a combination of risk factors related to fields such as orthopaedics, neurology, psychology etc. and it involves diagnosis by medical practitioners from all those fields. There is disparity in the occurrence of SNP for workers with similar backgrounds and work activities. The risk factors sourcing SNP are uncertain and vague among the people in the same working environment. Hence it is difficult to find the set of risk factors and the level of significance of the risk factors that create SNP. This will make the diagnosis process as complicated as possible. Identifying the risk factors causing SNP from the single or a combination of many of the specialized medical fields has become a tedious procedure. Now a day practitioners are interested in identifying accurate methods for evaluating the risk factors of SNP in an occupational setup as well as the precedence of occupations in generating SNP. It is highly important to acquire knowledge about the management of SNP and how musculoskeletal health can be maintained. Consequently SNP is one of the most important problems threatening the occupational society; it is essential to find a system that is capable of handling the knowledge of domain experts from all of these medical fields causing SNP and evaluate the risk level of SNP. Such an outsized problem faced by a physician and medical community motivates this research. It is an effort to develop a FDSS that can be used by medical practitioners to review the likelihood of the degree of severity of the SNP risk level caused by various risk factors in different occupational environments.

This research develops an evaluation criterion to determine the kind of highly periled occupation in engendering SNP among the chosen three. Decision making is a cumbersome process in any increasingly complex environments. SNP is one such problem where the knowledge of domain experts in various medical fields is necessary and a stringent system network is required for making effective decisions. This research formulates SNP problem as a multiple criteria decision making problem under uncertainty and the FAHP based analysis results in accurate alternative priority weights of the main and sub-attributes with respect to the goal. The results show that the proposed model is capable and flexible to apply in different types of occupations to prioritize their hazard level in SNP occurrence and it is a constructive tool to medical practitioners in diagnosis phase.