Streamlining ergonomic assessment of nonrepetitive workplaces

Work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs) pose a significant burden in nonrepetitive jobs like construction. Yet, identifying tasks that pose ergonomic risk is challenging because the assessor must account for the wide variety of tasks a worker might possibly do. Worker feedback is proposed as a method to narrow down the scope of tasks in such environments that pose the greatest ergonomic risks. While worker feedback is already utilized in ergonomic assessment, it is not typically used as a stand-alone tool. Further, it is not standardized, can be biased, and has not yet been studied in the context of task identification. This research proposes and evaluates a template for eliciting worker feedback on ergonomic risks in nonrepetitive jobs, with the goal of relying on this feedback to simplify ergonomic assessment. The five-step template consists of short focus groups and an anonymous survey, designed to be replicable and flexible. The template quality was evaluated along four dimensions: predictive validity, effectiveness, test-retest reliability, and intra-rater reliability. Predictive validity was assessed in three ways using the Workplace Ergonomic Risk Assessment (WERA) method as a control, effectiveness was assessed by examining how much the template reduced the scope of possible problem activities, and reliability was assessed using intra-class correlation coefficients (ICC). Using the results from eleven construction crews across five different employers, the template was found to have good predictive validity, good reliability, and reduced the scope of activities by about 60%. The template worked best for larger crew sizes with a relatively lower risk and smaller scope of work. However, all crews were still able to identify activities of relatively elevated risk level. The template emphasizes the importance of listening to workers in the assessment process, and since intervention is the next step in fixing ergonomic problems, future work could apply worker feedback to intervention ideas.

Author

• Manning, Christin Jennifer Weeks

Identifier

hdl:10057/29167

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:soar.wichita.edu:10057/29167