Assessment of work-related musculoskeletal disorders by observational methods in repetitive tasks - a systematic review

Abstract

Repetitive movements play an important role in the growing and aggravation of the discomforts related to the musculoskeletal system. There are many different observational methods for risk assessment for repeated movements in literature. The main objective of this review is to identify the observational methods that have been used to assess repetitive movements risk in previous studies. A systematic literature review was performed using the PRISMA protocol, in journal databases such as Taylor & Francis, Science Direct, and Scopus. We retrieved 322 articles and, after classification, 45 of them were selected for full analysis. Results showed that the most applied method was the OCRA method, especially by researchers from Italy and Brazil. Besides this, RULA (Rapid Upper Limb Assessment), QEC (Quick Exposure Check), and REBA (Rapid Entire Body Assessment) were also methods well-known and extensively applied to assess ergonomic repetitive working tasks.