Investigating Intra-Examiner and Inter-Examiner Reliability of Three Upper-Limb Risk Assessment Methods

There are several methods for assessing the ergonomics risk of upper-limb disorders in occupational health studies. The main objective of the present study is to determine the intra and inter-examiner reliability of three risk assessment methods of SI, OCRA Checklist and ART in repetitive tasks. Early, nine examiners used the three methods to assess the physical exposure level of the upper limb in workers 30 tasks with different levels of the profession for two assessment periods. In the results obtained using ICC for inter-examiner reliability, the risk categorizations were ρ: 0.54 to 0.77 for SI, OCRA Checklist and ART, Also the intra-examiner reliability for the final score of the three methods was κ: 0.59 to 0.67. The reliability for risk categorizations and the final score of this method using ICC obtained as moderate to good. However, the overall results showed that the reliability of the ART method was higher than the two other methods. The findings demonstrated that all three methods are appropriate for assessment in workplaces. These methods should be used based on assessment objectives, examiner skill and required duration time for assessing the tasks.

Keywords:

Musculoskeletal Disorders , OCRA Checklist , Strain Index , ART