Video Assessment

This record owns the footage and everything that determines whether the footage can carry a score. The task-level conclusion, the control decision and the follow-up all live in neighbouring templates that reference this assessment by its ID, and the boundary is worth keeping clean because the capture is the part that cannot be redone later.

Video assessment sits between two regimes that do not talk to each other. Ergonomics standards specify how a posture or a lift is evaluated and say nothing about how the data is obtained; data protection law governs filming an identifiable worker and says nothing about ergonomics. A defensible record has to satisfy both.

Two separate legal questions travel with every capture: may you film this worker, and does the method you scored them with count. The first is answered by privacy and surveillance law that differs sharply between jurisdictions; the second by ergonomics standards that are broadly international.

The analysis does the arithmetic, which removes the part of this assessment that used to absorb the effort and leaves the part that always decided its worth. Four judgements decide whether the record can be relied on, and all four are made before or just after the camera runs.

Findings cluster in two places: the capture, where the defect is technical and irreversible, and the consent and retention record, where it is legal and tends to be systemic across every capture the site holds.

A poultry processing site filmed a case-handling task after two discomfort reports. The capture was handheld, taken from the front because that was where the aisle let the assessor stand, and ran for about forty seconds. REBA came back in the investigate band with wrist posture as the dominant factor. The assessor answered the capture questions honestly, side view no, whole body partly, capture quality marginal, then answered recapture required as no, because the score was not in an action band and the line was about to change product.

Eleven months later an operator on that task lodged an upper-limb claim. The claimant's expert refilmed from the side, established that trunk flexion exceeded sixty degrees on every case taken from the bottom two layers, weighed the cases at 18 kg rather than the 12 kg assumed, and produced a REBA result two bands higher. The site's own assessment was disclosed alongside it.

The damaging document was not the expert's report. It was the site's record, which stated on its face that the side view had not been captured, that capture quality was marginal, and that no recapture had been thought necessary. The site had documented that it knew the assessment could not see the dominant exposure and chose not to look again. Had that record said recapture required, the position would have been ordinary diligence.

The analysis is the reliable part. What fails is everything wrapped around the footage: the capture nobody checked before the operator went home, the retention date that passed unnoticed, the change now band that never became an action.

KnowErgo

Holds captures against the task register, runs the selected methods on one upload, and refuses to close a record where capture quality is marginal and no recapture is raised.

Ella

Watches the retention dates and the open bands, flagging footage due for deletion and results in an action band with no CAPA or reassessment attached.

KnowTrain

Evidences assessor competence before a record can be signed, and takes captures marked as training material into the manual handling course content.

KnowComply

Keeps the lawful basis, notice requirements and storage location for worker footage in one place, so a site knows what it holds and under what justification.

RULA

Rapid Upper Limb Assessment. A posture scoring method weighted towards the upper limb, neck and trunk, with static loading and repetition adjustments, giving an action level from one to four.

REBA

Rapid Entire Body Assessment. A whole-body posture method that adds legs and hand coupling, better suited to unpredictable postures and handling tasks than RULA.

NIOSH lifting equation

A two-handed lifting method producing a recommended weight limit and a lifting index from horizontal and vertical distances, asymmetry, frequency, duration and coupling.

Snook tables

Population tables giving the proportion of men and women capable of a given push, pull, lift or carry at a stated force, distance and frequency.

MAC

The Manual Handling Assessment Charts, a screening tool for lifting, carrying and team handling producing colour bands and a numerical score.

Risk band

The normalised interpretation of a method score, from acceptable through investigate and change soon to change now, letting different methods be compared.

Dominant contributing factor

The element that drove the score: trunk, wrist, neck, legs, force, repetition, static holding or coupling. The single most useful output, because it says where the control belongs.

Override

An assessor's deliberate change to a returned score where the analysis has misread the footage, which is legitimate only with a written reason naming the misread element.