Reducing Occupational Injuries Among Dairy Farm Workers through the Certified Safe Dairy Worker Program

Agriculture consistently ranks as one of the most hazardous industries, with dairy farm workers in the United States experiencing among the highest number of injuries across all farming subgroups. Dairy farm workers interact with a myriad of hazards throughout the workday, like heavy machinery, toxic chemicals, animals, physical hazards, manure pits, and biological hazards. To further compound these risks, more than half of all agriculture workers encounter language barriers on the job which can make communicating safety practices inaccessible among employees. Basic farm laborer jobs do not have training requirements which has its pros and cons – on one hand, this eliminates several barriers to entry into the field, on the other hand, workers may not be aware of the hazards associated with this type of work; much less how to avoid them. This creates the perfect storm for high rates of preventable injuries among dairy farm workers. The Certified Safe Dairy Worker Certification Program aims to professionalize dairy farming by providing hands-on training to dairy farm workers in a culturally and linguistically appropriate manner. The program will train participants to recognize, prevent, and mitigate common workplace hazards; Thereby leaving them with skills that increase confidence on the job, making them safer and more productive. The pilot program will take place in Chippewa County, Wisconsin where a cohort of Dairy Farm Workers will have the opportunity to earn the Certified Safe Dairy Worker Certificate. They will be followed for one year alongside a control group from the same county to track incident work-related injuries. During this time, participants will receive a modest quarterly financial incentive from the program at each follow-up check-in where they will report injuries and near misses. Farms that employ certified individuals will receive a stipend for their insurance premiums proportional to the number of certified employees on their operation to incentivize hiring these individuals. Thereby making certification mutually beneficial for employees and the employer. Following successful completion of the pilot program, the program will be scaled up to the national level in partnership with NIOSH and OSHA. The CSDW certification program aims to make safe occupational practices the easy and desirable choice across all dairy farms in the United States.Master of Public Healt

Drunkenness and discipline: “Misconduct” and its consequences in World War I

Faculty advisor: Evan RobertsThis research was supported by the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP)

DecoBubbles.com: The first crowdsourcing initiative to expedite VGE counting in 2D-ultrasound recordings and provide labels for machine learning

Introduction/Background Venous gas emboli (VGE) detected with echocardi­ography post-dive are often used as a marker of decompression stress. The very time-consuming analysis of the acquired videos can help elucidate inter- and intrasubject variability in VGE, and DCS susceptibility. This collaborative project aims to reduce the time needed to count and analyze cardiac ultrasound videos and help train an Al to complete the task. To accomplish this, an interactive web platform 'www.decobubbles.com' was developed that allows crowdsourcing the counting process to lay persons without previous expertise in ultrasound analysis. Materials and Methods Volunteers from around the world are encouraged to register on the website to help with this initiative. After registration the volunteer is prompted to watch an eight-minute training tutorial teaching them how to choose suitable frames in the videos, count VGE and submit their assessment. A volunteer is allowed to participate in the project once they have succeeded in completing a number of training videos in which they need to agree with the counts of professional graders. A database of 204 de-identified post-dive ultrasound videos of variable quality have been uploaded to the application. Results The application on www.decobubbles.com is active since February 2021 and at the beginning of March 2021 had registered 153 unique raters, 587 submitted ratings, and 34% of the 204 videos in the database were fully rated, which means that three independent raters agreed in their counting. Summary/Conclusion This collaborative platform will allow refinement of an Al to count VGE in post-dive echocardiography recordings and advance the knowledge about inter­and intrasubjectVGE variability in divers. Future implications include the possibility for researchers to use the platform to directly analyze their own datasets - with no obligation to add these to our database, although we welcome more videos from other sources and collaborators. This research is funded through the Divers Alert Network (#DAN-UNC-1) and the Office of Naval Research (ONR #N00014-20-1-2590)