Measurement of Subject-Specific Local Muscle Fatigability

Cumulative muscle fatigue is one of the potential reasons leading to musculoskeletal disorders, and individual differences also result in different muscle fatigue progressions among workers while completing the same physical operation. Determination of subject-specific muscle fatigability could help the assignment of work-rest schedule individually, and further reduce musculoskeletal disorders. In this paper, the subject-specific fatigability is defined, and the features of subject-specific fatigability are proposed. According to the definition, a muscle fatigue model based approach is proposed and compared with conventional methods used to demonstrate fatigability. A novel and efficient method to determine subject-specific fatigue rate is developed based a muscle fatigue model and preliminarily validated by comparing force decline data from the literature.