A REVIEW OF CURRENT STUDIES TO EVALUATE THE EFFORT OF THE HAND OF THE PRUNER

In vineyard cultivation, winter pruning is one of the main operational phases which engages a significant number of workers and working hours. The widespread use of pneumatic or electric shears showed an improvement in the quality of work, but in the moments of greatest intensity of labor, when the company is forced to employ extra staff, there is significant presence of traditional shears. Therefore, this activity falls between those observed for the risk assessment of skeletal muscle from repeated movements. This assessment is being conducted through the check-list of the OCRA method that relies on scores to the type of gesture and their relative count, while the intensity is calculated through subjective expression of the workers interviewed. The possibility to transform this subjective expression in a quantifiable value has been the subject of studies through the use of a kit of sensors applicable to the handles of the shears, capable of recording the pressure exerted by the fingers of the hand during the act of pruning. This methodology, repeated on different vine cultivars, on different diameters of the branches showed a significant correlation with the thesis under comparison demonstrating the ability of the kit to express the amount of effort detectable by the different areas of the hand. Probably, in the next future will need to make greater use of wireless and lightweight equipment, useful to carry out trials in field. Furthermore, it can be identified and investigated the correlation between the signals obtained from the scissor, the measure of the effort actually incurred from the operator during cutting and the response of the signals coming from electromyography. In this article then available methodologies are shown and the main results achieved so far for obtaining an objective index of the intensity of the gesture of pruning.