Recent evidence strongly suggests that force and repetition interact in a consistent manner to affect the risk of musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs), likely due to an underlying fatigue failure process in affected tissues. However, no MSD tools to date have been based on fatigue failure theory. The present proposal describes a basis for incorporating fatigue failure theory in a new low back exposure assessment tool: the Low Back Cumulative Trauma Index (LBCTI), and provides an illustration of the effectiveness of such an approach using an existing database on low back disorder (LBD) risk. The LBCTI demonstrated a dose-response relationship to LBD risk.
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