Etiscope: what it does and how the work flows

Manual tasks injure people gradually. Not usually in one dramatic lift, but through posture held too long, the same reach repeated through a shift, and effort sustained past the point where the body can recover between cycles. That is what makes musculoskeletal injury hard to manage: the damage accumulates out of sight.

The traditional answer is to send an expert to watch the job and score it by eye. That works well, but it's hard to stretch across every task on a large site.

Etiscope takes a different route. It measures the movement directly, on the job, while the work is being done normally, and turns what it measures into a risk score you can act on. Rather than an opinion about the task, you get a record of how it was actually performed, with a number attached.

Etiscope has three parts, and every lesson in this guide sits in one of them.

The sensors and the app do the capture. The dashboard is where capture turns into a program.

However large your rollout, the work follows the same path, and this guide walks you through it in that order.

1. Set up, once. An administrator builds your organisation's structure — business units, sites, work areas, jobs, shifts — and adds the people who will do the work.
2. Prepare the kit. Charge and assign the sensors, sign in to the app, and fit each sensor to its body location.
3. Plan the assessment. Decide what counts as one work task and where it starts and stops, then create the assessment against it.
4. Capture. Fit the sensors, normalise — record the worker's neutral standing posture as the baseline — then record the task and save.
5. Complete the record. Add what the sensors cannot know: how long the task runs, how often it repeats, how heavy it feels. The app calculates the Consequential Risk Score and the reports.
6. Review and act. In the dashboard, decide which assessments deserve action, create risk controls against them, and re-assess to see whether the change worked.

The loop closes at step six. A control that goes in without a follow-up assessment is a change you believe in; a control with a before and an after is a change you can show. You'll see that idea come up throughout the guide.

The sensors measure movement of the neck, back and shoulders — posture, repetition and sustained positions. It's worth knowing that coverage precisely, because it tells you which tasks Etiscope is the right instrument for.

There are two things it doesn't do. It doesn't measure below the elbow or the legs — wrist, hand and lower-limb postures are outside the sensor set. And it doesn't weigh the load: you enter load as perceived load, which you ask the worker about. Entering a weight you read off a label won't change the score, and Complete the record: Extra Information explains why.

Etiscope is a screening instrument. It shows you, at volume, which tasks deserve attention, and it works alongside the traditional assessment methods you already use. A high score is a reason to look closer, not a verdict.

This guide is one path, in order, from here to running your program. Reading it end to end gives you the full picture, but if you have a job to do this week, one of these starting points will get you there sooner.

• You'll be doing assessments. Carry straight on. Prepare the kit, sensors and app through to Read the results and choose the right report takes you from the box to your first report.
• You'll be reviewing assessments and managing risk controls. Start at Review assessments in the dashboard and work forward.
• You're setting Etiscope up for your organisation. Start with Set up your organisation, users and categories, and keep Keep the data clean and get it out handy for later.

Whichever you pick, each lesson lists what comes before it, so you can always step back if you need to.