Why Relying on AI for Ergonomics Assessments Is a Risk You Can't Afford to Take

AI tools are everywhere right now, and the ergonomics world is not immune to the hype. Some healthcare professionals are already looking to AI to do their assessments, generate their reports, and identify ergonomic risk on their behalf. And Darcie Jaremey has something to say about that. 

In this episode, Darcie makes a clear, direct argument: if you are relying on an AI tool to replace your clinical judgment in an ergonomics assessment, you are putting your clients, your reputation, and your business at serious risk. A one-size-fits-all AI report will not capture the intricacies of a specific workstation, cannot perform a true root cause analysis, and cannot defend you if a client is harmed and the matter goes to litigation.

But this is not an anti-AI episode. Darcie also covers exactly where AI belongs in an ergonomics practice: as an efficiency tool on the front end of report writing, never as a replacement for your expertise.

What you'll take away:

• Why office ergonomics is in-demand right now and why your expertise is the thing businesses actually need
• The real risk of outsourcing your assessment thinking to a tool you don't control
• What happens to your client data when you put it into a third-party AI platform
• Why the details in your report are the exact thing clients can't replicate themselves
• The three tools inside Accelerate that add efficiency without replacing judgment: the swipe file, the equipment database, and the PHI redactor

•       Why mentorship beats AI every time when you're building your ergonomics foundation 

If you've been wondering whether AI could shortcut the process of learning to do ergonomics assessments well, this episode will give you a straight answer. 

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Ergonomics Blueprint (learn how to do office ergonomics assessments): ergonomicshelp.com
• Accelerate: The Business of Ergonomics (membership with tools, mentorship, and community): ergonomicshelp.com/biz
• OSHA Injury Cost Estimator: osha.gov

If you're a healthcare professional and this episode got your wheels turning about office ergonomics - good. I've got free resources to help you take the next step at ergonomicshelp.com/resources. 

Transcript

Darcie J's video recording 0:00

Today on the show we're talking about artificial intelligence and ergonomics. Let's dive into this right now

0:08

Welcome to The Business of Ergonomics podcast. I'm your host, Darcy Jeremy. I'm a board certified professional ergonomist with over 15 years of experience delivering ergonomics programs to employers of all different types. In this podcast, I share what other healthcare professionals are already doing and being with ergonomics assessments, and how to land those clients that you dream of.

Darcie J's video recording 0:35

There's something that needs to be said about AI and ergonomics professionals, especially if you are just learning the skill set Ergonomics is an in-demand practice, okay? We know that we can provide value to workplaces whether or not there's an injury actually happening. There's compliance related to OSHA that companies are on the hook for in many cases. we can help from an injury perspective, from a prevention standpoint, from someone staying at work even though they're in a little bit of discomfort. There's so many angles to this, whether you're preventing or getting someone back to work, there's value, okay? And we know how expensive these injuries are. If you go to the OSHA injury estimator, you can see that, sprain and strain, let's say like a carpal tunnel syndrome, that type of injury that will probably require surgery and some time off work, that's $67,000 in direct and indirect fees. That's huge. So the bare minimum to get started with this is let's figure out where the injuries are, let's provide services, and let's build a relationship so when an injury does happen, what can we be doing to help that person along? Help that business maintain costs, help that business remain profitable. Because at the end of the day, ergonomics is just about the fit, and when there is a mismatch, injuries happen. But we are looking for creative solutions. I strongly recommend if you are a healthcare professional, learning how to do an office ergonomic assessment, that's a game changer whether or not you do it once a week for an office ergonomic assessment or once every month or once every six months. It's a skill that your clients will thank you for. So if you're in the clinic, you're seeing that people are coming into your clinic, and there are some aches and pains there it's gonna be coming from their office. Who's gonna help? If you're working in a clinic as a PT, OT, you name it, chiro, massage, the list can go on and on, a kinesiologist, having that in-demand service not only will offer a holistic solution to that person who's off work or injured at your clinic, and it's also, a value-added service, so you can get more income from that. In saying that, there's huge value, there's huge implications. What I have been seeing is that- Some, not all, some healthcare professionals are looking at AI to replace their expertise. I'm telling you right now, if you're looking to hack the system to just get some tool to do their office ergonomic assessment or an industrial ergonomics assessment for you and totally rely on that for everything without actually understanding what a root cause analysis looks like, how to identify an ergonomics risk, that is a huge risk that you are taking in terms of liability, in terms of making the wrong solution to your client, and overall expertise. If you are relying on an AI tool to do your assessment for you, to do the majority of the thinking of your report, then you are basically replacing yourself with machines at this point. If you are in the field of ergonomics, then you have to be competent, you can be confident doing this. You have experience, you have an X amount of office ergonomics assessments or industrial ergonomics assessments completed before you're offering this to the public, okay? That's something that I think we need to get aligned with. Because if you are relying on AI tools, that is gonna hurt the entire field. Why? If a business owner is looking at the report that you generated, and they see, like, it's just a simple report that's not really getting into the juicy details and not offering solutions based on the intricacies involved in that specific workstation, you know what they're gonna do? They're just gonna do the exact same thing and save themself between three hundred and a thousand dollars for every office ergonomic assessment that you are charging for, and they're gonna buy the subscription for the AI tool for ergonomics for whatever cost it is a month, let's say a couple hundred, and they're gonna do everything. There is a role of AI that we can leverage as experts. And in Accelerate the Business of Ergonomics, we have a number of AI tools and services that we have developed after years and years and years of being in this field, 20 years, to help you get through your report more efficiently and effectively. That's where I think the value is, okay? So that we're on the same page. Can we replace your thinking? No, you gotta do it yourself. Let's play devil's advocate. Let's say you do go forward and you want to be absolutely relying on a tool. Let's say overnight the terms of service change for that tool, and automatically you don't own your data anymore. There's been a data breach. What are you gonna say to your clients that have all of these boxes that you have to check to even get that contract in the first place? Let's say overnight there's a change in that terms of service with the AI company that you're doing business with, that It's tripled in price to do something that you didn't really need in the first place. Because office ergonomics, as you may know, is one of the most simple types of services out there. And don't get me wrong, just because something is simple does not mean that it's easy. There's a lot of parts to the process, and if you screw it up, then it's not looking good for your reputation, you could be hurting people. There's so many negative effects for this. But comparing it to something like brain surgery or putting a man on the moon, it is so much more straightforward to that. Especially instead of investing in AI tools to get you through that report or to get you through that assessment, and you have no knowledge, you should be investing in mentorship with someone who has already done office ergonomics assessments, like the Accelerate the Business of Ergonomics membership. And I'm not doing this as an advertising for this because you can certainly go other places to get mentorship. You can sign up to be an employee at a business, or you can pay an ergonomics expert to be your mentor, or you can get all of that and a community of your peers with Accelerate the Business of Ergonomics. And I say this because if you have the expertise, then you can offer different types of services. many of which these AI tools aren't gonna help you with. You can pivot your services, so whatever happens in this crazy world of AI, whatever's coming down the pipeline next, you can pivot and have the expertise so that you can provide value to workplaces still. Look, I know that this AI game, there's a lot of miscommunication out there. It can be scary. It can feel like we are being replaced by these AI tools. But I promise you, if you have the experience, if you know how to do an office ergonomic assessment and other services with that is not replaceable. And if it means that you have to fix the problems that these tools cause for businesses because an HR person just wanted to do it themself, so be it. But guess what? Your hourly rate just went up because you have to analyze all this other crap that AI risk assessment tool outputted. So we better check ourselves with these AI tools before we wreck ourselves because going on a stand for litigation because of you relying on some AI ergonomics tool to complete your reports and your assessments, that's not defensible in my opinion. You're gonna get in trouble because you're relying on a tool to get through your ergonomics assessments faster. You can't rely on an AI tool. You have to know how the system works. But in saying that, do I believe we can add efficiencies to your report? Absolutely. However, I wanna remind you that if you are using like a click app report, you're probably gonna be missing a lot of the intricacies involved in an ergonomics assessment. And the intricacies or the details are the way that you can charge more for your services, okay? If you're just using some tailored, report that you printed off some company's website or maybe you got trained in and you're not making it absolutely useful for that client, then they can do it themselves, right? Right now in the world of ergonomics, it's about how to give yourself that advantage. What can you do so well that people are gonna be recommending you? Is it gonna be to use some random report that you got, from an AI tool? No. It's gonna be developing your own tool and getting specific with the client that you're seeing. Like I said before, ergonomics assessments is simple, but just because it's simple doesn't make it com- complicated or just because it's simple doesn't make it easy and there are details as ergonomics professionals that we should be putting into our report so it helps our clients succeed and often it will not get into a two-page report just because that's the template that you're using from some, something that you have a subscription to, okay? There are ways that you can get through report writing faster. In Accelerate the Business of Ergonomics, you have three resources that can really help. Number one is the swipe file, where you can copy and paste the most complicated part of an ergonomics assessment report into your own report. These are things that cost you the most time, okay? So identifying where the root cause is where I see most of the mistakes. And if you were never trained on how to do a good root cause analysis, then what do you know? That's gonna be a major issue for you So what you're basically doing this, and this is something that I saw when using my own swipe tool, and this is something that I built in-house. It's not AI. These are things that I have been writing in my reports for almost two decades. These are things that work, okay? And whether or not you're in Accelerate the Business of Ergonomics now or later, this can save you like ten hours for every report that you ever do. So we're looking for efficiencies. You're understanding the process because you're learning what root causes to select. And with coaching and mentorship from someone who's been in the field for decades, that's me, you can figure out how this system's working. It's a time-saving tool. It's not replacing your expertise. so valuable here is making sure that you are recommending the right equipment. So that's why in Accelerate the Business of Ergonomics that we have a whole database of useful ergonomics equipment that has all the specifications here. The best part is that you can compare them actively against like five or six or whatever amount of products. So if you know you need to recommend Attentive keyboard, then you s- search by that name and you compare all the options based on what you saw in that ergonomic assessment and based on what the risk, and based on what the root cause is from that swipe, copy and paste report, put in your Because if you're gonna be charging between three hundred and a thousand dollars for every office ergonomic report, then we have to be recommending solutions. It's not just sit up straight. It's, "Hey, we've identified this is where the root cause is. We've tried to adjust the workstation to mediate that and to make things more within, an optimal work setup. However, that was not possible. So to ensure that that person is working under optimal work positions, we have to recommend this piece of equipment", or you engineer it out, right? So that is the difference that makes the difference for high-value office ergonomic assessors that can charge a thousand dollars. They're getting into the details, and then they're engineering out the ergonomic risk. And you engineer out the ergonomic risk by putting equipment in. And you wanna make sure that you're recommending the best equipment. That's where the ergonomic database comes in So instead of researching every piece of equipment that exists, you know what exists. You have some recommendations. You can pick what works. You can put it in your report. Then to aid with overall writing of the report, putting in your notes, 'cause sometimes, you know, we just need that bot to help us write a report faster. But just very basic, what that person did, that interview, that job description that you can put in the front end of your report because you really should be starting every report with some descriptive information. And if you're negating that, then boy, are you leaving some major points on the table of how to identify where the root cause is and potential fixes for that person as well. So I see that AI does have a role on the front end of your report. Again, not the analysis. So that's why we made our own AI information redactor. 'Cause as I mentioned in the front end of this call, and by call I mean whatever we're doing, this podcast this information exchange, that when we have personal information that doesn't belong to us, we have to take care of it. And if we're putting that on a third party's AI bot or if you're putting that on some sort of ergonomic risk analysis tool, then that is a huge risk that you can be taking on for your business. So what we developed is a redactor for that personal health information. Takes out all personal health information, and then from that you can put it into some sort of AI tool format. All right? You get that out. You put it back into the AI redactor. It puts all that personal health information back in there, and you can put it in your report. And no, we don't store any of your health information about your clients. It's all on your personal computer, which is huge. to close this out, look, I, I know it's a crazy time to be doing ergonomics assessments, whether it's office or industrial. But if you're just getting started in this, I really wanna recommend that you don't offload the knowledge. You have to learn how to do the process, and you have to get your repetitions of office ergonomics assessments done too. That takes time. It takes effort. This is not a hack to the system to get rich quick. Both you and I know whenever we hear get rich quick schemes, they never work. But what does work is actually committing to this process, learning how to do an office ergonomic assessment. You probably know that I have a program that you can get started with called the Ergonomics Blueprint that shows you exactly how to get started with office ergonomics assessments, and then how to profit with that. Not taking any shortcuts with learning that information can allow you to take some shortcuts later once you have a really strong foundation. But skipping that foundation only sets you up for failure. You must have a strong foundation. There's no hacks around it. The only hack, if I do dare so say something like that, is based on getting a mentor like yours truly to help you through the process. It is simple, but just because it's simple doesn't make it easy. That's it for today, folks. Thanks for being a part with us. Can't wait to be with you in the next episode.