Jouko Soukainen's research while affiliated with Finnish Institute of Occupational Health and other places

... In a perfectly sustainable working life, an individual with an injury or illness always recovers adequately and returns to work smoothly, but in the real world, not everyone can return to work in a timely manner [9,10]. A persistent health issue often is the main obstacle to returning to work or to finding a suitable new job [11][12][13]. Studies have found that health problems, particularly long-term sickness absences, are strong predictors of filing for disability pensions [2,14,15]. ...

... The physiological demands on firefighters during simulated firefighting have been measured in a number of studies. The results show that the maximal oxygen uptake of a firefighter should be at least 40 ml × kg -1 × min -1 [1,2,[6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. Such an uptake is in line with what is found amongst sedentary middle-aged adults [18]. ...

... When measures of trunk muscle activation and spine motion are directly incorporated into advanced musculoskeletal models of the lumbar torso, spine compression and shear force estimates are highly sensitive to within-and between-performer movement strategy differences (Davis and Jorgensen 2005). With one exception (Lett and McGill 2006), previous methods to quantify spine loading in firefighters did not incorporate kinematic, kinetic, and electromyographic (EMG) measurements (Beach, Frost, McGill, et al. 2014;Lusa et al. 1991;Lavender et al. 2000). Lett and McGill (2006) used a sophisticated EMG-assisted musculoskeletal modelling approach to analyse pushing and pulling exertions performed by firefighters and university students; the authors found that inter-individual differences in movement strategies were largely responsible for the biomechanically significant within-and between-group variation in spine compression and shear forces observed. ...