The Impact of Mobile Touch Screen Device Use on Musculoskeletal Disorder: Risk Assessment Modeling and Verification

Background. Touch screen interface is a technology that is applied to almost all mobile devices. Their intensive and repetitive touch screen may pose a significant problem, which creates ergonomic pains on musculoskeletal disorders. Purpose. This research aims to study the impact of using Mobile Touch Screen Devices (MTSDs) on the human musculoskeletal system and assess the pain interference with the ability to work. Methods. Cornell musculoskeletal discomfort questionnaire was given to 544 participants (71% males and 29% females) at the Eastern Mediterranean University. Association rules mining technique is applied to illustrate the correlation and logistic regression to identify the significant risk factors. Subsequently, the sample data was tested using five different machine learning models; the support vector machine, the long-short-term memory neural, the back-propagation, radial basis function and the ensemble bagged tree to offer predictive accuracy. Results. Most musculoskeletal disorders were reported in the neck region and lower back (64.3% and 55.3%) respectively, followed by upper back (44.3%), and the right shoulder (37.5%). Analysis of association rules showed positive correlation between the lower back and the neck (support = 44%, confidence = 77%). The discomforts were at the neck, shoulders, upper and lower back. The findings reveal that both sitting and behind a desk performing a task while sitting result in significant risk factors of physical discomfort. Additionally, the results found that the results found that the ensemble bagged tree has the highest accuracy in prediction. The ensemble bagged tree achieved the highest scores of all of the metrics (91%, 94.3 %, 96.1%, and 95.2% for accuracy, macro-precision, macro-recall, and macro-averaged F1-score) and outperformed other models. Conclusions. The ensemble bagged tree predicted the interference of the pain in the muscle performance ability for the users. Moreover, the discomfort level was the highest in the neck and lower back areas.