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Ohio volunteers are needed for virtual farm safety study

By JANE HOUIN
Ohio Correspondent

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Experience can be an expensive teacher. Sometimes learning from experience can be dangerous and even deadly. That’s often the case with farm safety.

That’s why the Ohio Supercomputer Center is stepping in and offering a study designed to help those involved in production agriculture learn from their hands-on experience - only without real-world consequences.

Don Stredney is the principal investigator on a project funded by the National Institute on Health and Safety and the Great Lakes Center for Agricultural Safety and Health that is using virtual reality (VR) to simulate real-world situations.

“We’re investigating how emerging technologies can provide safe and effective ways to study human behavior around dangerous agricultural settings,” Stredney said.

Investigators on this project are adapting current technologies to simulate an environment with a power take off (PTO) shaft, an indispensable tool on farms. The PTO transfers power from common tractors to be redirected to drive a variety of implements. PTOs are a common on-farm source of injuries, either through entrapment or entanglement.

The research is designed to look at the advantages and disadvantages of the VR approach on the PTO environment. The data collected will also help generate additional studies designed for future research.

Stredney, who lives in the country and has a small tree farm himself, didn’t come up with the idea of doing agricultural-based research studies on his own.

“I was really drawn into it with colleagues from the College of Public Health at OSU who have been doing studies on farm safety at a variety of levels, including pesticides and such,” Stredney said. “They knew what we were trying to do with virtual reality and such. It seemed a good fit.”

Stredney has conducted other studies using agricultural situations that take advantage of the virtual reality platform, including a virtual simulation for evaluating safe practice for tractor certification.
In the tractor certification study, the simulation was set up to simulate driving a tractor down a narrow country road with ditches on either side. Vehicle traffic, including trucks and buses, were introduced to simulate real-world traffic.

“Drivers” then had to respond to the changes in their situation, either by slowing down and pulling safely to the side of the road or by pulling over too far, which could result in “rolling” the virtual tractor.

For this type of virtual reality study, the biggest benefit, Stredney said, is just to be able to develop these kinds of technologies for these concepts. He looks at who might be using these types of environments and how they might use them.

In addition to the safety factor, one huge advantage is that virtual reality offers the ability to do a rapid prototyping and then try things out.

The challenge in using VR is trying to quantify if he gets good results for this kind of study as opposed to the real world.
Obviously, human subjects can’t be used for this type of experience in a real-world environment, especially when it comes to using PTOs safely. Stredney uses this study as a tool to completely evaluate both the physical and physiological effects in a PTO environment.
“Longer term, if we show there’s efficacy, it might be used by an industrial systems engineer in the design process or even Extension agents to show what this is like,” Stredney said. “As the cost comes down, this might be something that is even more engaging.

In the tractor rollover study Stredney was involved in, that target population was youth - to give them a sense that this can happen to them, and it can happen quickly - all in an engaging environment.

“The virtual reality environment can provide avenues for doing that at a little more of an engaging level than say watching a (safety) movie,” Stredney said.

Participants should plan on spending 2 hours and 10 minutes participating in the study in addition to their travel time to OSC. Women who are pregnant or may become pregnant are not eligible to participate in this study. Those experiencing a strong fear of blood, such as feeling faint at the sight of blood, needles or injuries, should also not participate.

Other conditions which would prevent an individual from being eligible to participate in the study include if you or a loved one was involved in a traumatic event, such as entanglement in equipment, and find the thought of this upsetting or if you have ever experienced lightheadedness, confusion or altered vision caused by flashing lights. Those who have experienced epileptic seizures should also not participate in the study.

Stredney is approximately halfway through the PTO study.
Those interested in learning more about becoming a volunteer can contact Stredney at 614-292-8447.

6/4/2008