Development of a new headgear in reducing thermal features for oil palm harvesters

Agriculture is one of the most hazardous occupations worldwide. Occupational accidents in agriculture sector is the second highest especially in the palm oil industry where the works are being carried out, especially in the upstream, are very labor intensive. Due to discomfort, harvesters tend to take off their safety helmet in which the act poses high risk to injury due to falling palm oil fruit and frond. Head injury is the main concern as it can result into permanent disability and may even lead to fatality. Safety helmet for use by oil palm harvesters should be modified to ensure the oil palm harvesters more comfortable, therefore encouraging them to wear them consistently during working, comply with existing regulations thus minimize injuries. The aim of this study are to holistically determine the issues of acceptance of existing safety helmet, to determine the requirements for establishing design criteria and finally to design and develop a new safety helmet for oil palm workers. DMADV Design methodology was employed with EQUID being adopted enabling design engineer to understand and identify human factor, technical and other stakeholder’s requirements. Suitable tools or technics were utilized such as VoC, Affinity Diagram and QFD starting from defining needs and requirements, new design criteria and specifications right up to finalizing the design in order to have a new safety helmet design that satisfies ergonomics quality with the highest quality and reliability. It is learnt that among the emphasized issues of usage of current safety helmet, the problem of thermal discomfort associated with working in an unpleasantly hot environment is a significant deterrent to its use. All user’s and stakeholders’ identified requirements converted to functional requirements; and later design criteria and new safety helmet specifications established. Proposed designs were reviewed with relevant stakeholders, iteratively modelled and analyzed for an optimally designed safety helmet to fulfill all the identified requirements. Notwithstanding that the absence of regulatory standard for thermal comfort, design detailing and engineering analysis effort was orchestrated to ensure thermal discomfort is significantly reduced to meet the targeted specification. High fidelity prototypes were fabricated, field test was conducted to find the acceptability of the new helmet against the current existing helmets. The new safety helmet design was well accepted as there is a significance increase of acceptance level of parameter (comfort, ventilation, hotness, safety, design, peak and fit) in day 1, day 3 and day 6 among oil palm harvesters. Engineering design methodology was employed incorporating suitable engineering design tools to ensure fulfilment of human factor, engineering and safety requirements. While important issues such as weigh and fitting have been identified, crucial design-related issues like thermal discomfort and the peak/tip is disturbing the harvesting were managed to be addressed and resolved. The well accepted newly proposed safety helmet for oil palm harvester not only solving thermal discomfort issue while being able to meet stringent safety requirements, but it also resolves all other addressed concerns such as fitting, weight and task-oriented design issues.

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