Investigation of the effectiveness of European assembly worksheet in assessing organizational measures for MSD risk assessment

Abstract

MSDs have been shown to develop a high prevalence among working persons. Therefore the need to prevent working persons from developing MSDs has to assume even greater importance. Today, there are signs of a growing interest in reducing physical workload by applying organizational measures. However, there is an urgent need to provide appropriate ergonomic easy-to-use methods for business practice to investigate effectiveness of organizational measures. Today ergonomic methods seem to miss methodic assistance to address the investigation of organizational measures like job rotation or short breaks of production processes. We found that EAWS could not assess a decrease of workload by applying organizational methods. In future, an implementation of further organizational methods in work systems is expected due to the demographic change and an increase in the number of elder working persons, e.g. short breaks of production processes. Therefore, the need for an assessment of organizational methods will increase.