Application of AULA Risk Assessment Tool by Comparison with Other Ergonomic Risk Assessment Tools

Kyeong-Hee Choi, Dae-Min Kim, Min-Uk Cho, Chae-Won Park, Seoung-Yeon Kim, Min-Jung Kim and Yong-Ku Kong
Additional contact information
Kyeong-Hee Choi: Department of Industrial Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon 16419, Korea
Dae-Min Kim: Division of ICT Convergence Engineering, Dongseo University, Busan 47011, Korea
Min-Uk Cho: Department of Industrial Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon 16419, Korea
Chae-Won Park: Department of Industrial Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon 16419, Korea
Seoung-Yeon Kim: Department of Industrial Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon 16419, Korea
Min-Jung Kim: Department of Industrial Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon 16419, Korea
Yong-Ku Kong: Department of Industrial Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon 16419, Korea

IJERPH, 2020, vol. 17, issue 18, 1-9

Abstract: Agricultural upper limb assessment (AULA), which was developed for evaluating upper limb body postures, was compared with the existing assessment tools such as rapid upper limb assessment (RULA), rapid entire body assessment (REBA), and ovako working posture analysis system (OWAS) based on the results of experts’ assessments of 196 farm tasks in this study. The expert group consisted of ergonomists, industrial medicine experts, and agricultural experts. As a result of the hit rate analysis, the hit rate (average: 48.6%) of AULA was significantly higher than those of the other assessment tools (RULA: 33.3%, REBA: 30.1%, and OWAS: 34.4%). The quadratic weighted kappa analysis also showed that the kappa value (0.718) of AULA was significantly higher than those of the other assessment tools (0.599, 0.578, and 0.538 for RULA, REBA, and OWAS, respectively). Based on the results, AULA showed a better agreement with expert evaluation results than other evaluation tools. In general, other assessment tools tended to underestimate the risk of upper limb posture in this study. AULA would be an appropriate evaluation tool to assess the risk of various upper limb postures.

Keywords: ergonomic risk assessment tools; hit rate analysis; quadratic weighted kappa analysis; AULA; REBA; RULA; OWAS (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/18/6479/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/18/6479/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:17:y:2020:i:18:p:6479-:d:409511

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().