3.1. Risk classification
Fig. 1 illustrates the risk level distribution for all the workstations.
Since QEC and OCRA provide separated scores for different
body regions (e.g., QEC general, QEC wrist/hand, QEC shoulder), the
results for a total of 11 indices from the eight methods are presented.
At first glance, a high majority of workstations emerge as
moderate or high risk. The QEC General index assessed the smallest
proportion of workstations as high risk (35%) followed by FIOH
MSD with 42%. The FIOH MSD, RULA and REBA methods did not
identify any workstations as low risk. REBA and RULA classified the
majority of workstations (70% and 76%, respectively) in the high
risk category. In categorizing 37% of workstations as low-risk, HAL
emerged as the least conservative method for assessing risk to the
hands and wrists, followed by the OCRA Hand/wrist/elbow and JSI
indices, which ranked only 22% and 9%, respectively, in this category.
The QEC Hand/wrist index is even more stringent, classifying
only 65% of workstations in the high-risk category. The EN 1005-3
standard classified the most workstations as posing high risk to the
shoulder (86%). The QEC Shoulder/arm and OCRA Shoulder indices
divided the workstations similarly, assessing 70% and 69%,
respectively, as high risk.