Development and evaluation of an Agricultural Cumulative Risk Evaluation System (ACRES): An ergonomic tool usability study across various lifting and postural assessment systems for novice users

Abstract

This paper aims to compare agreeance of four of most commonly used ergonomics assessment tools as well as introduce the Agriculture Cumulative Risk Evaluation Systems (ACRES), a tool that assesses both lifting and posture. ACRES discretizes factors to evaluate ergonomic risk. Participants lacked substantial experience with ergonomic tools, but were given instruction guides for each tool and tasked with evaluating various lifting and repetitive tasks to help evaluate initial perceptions. Results showed that REBA, QEC, and ACRES all had significant correlations with a more linear relationship between REBA and ACRES than REBA and QEC. The NIOSH lifting equation and the Snook and Cirello tables were too different to have significant correlation whereas ACRES was able to correlate with RNLE. In all cases REBA and the RNLE were found to be more difficult to use to novices and ACRES was perceived to be more appropriate for the lifting tasks.