Affiliations: University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA | University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, FL,
USA | Ford Motor Company | UAW-Ford National Joint Committee on Health and
Safety
Note: [] Address for correspondence: Donald S. Bloswick, Ph.D., P.E.,
CPE, Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering, University of Utah, 50 S
Central Campus Drive RM 2110, Salt Lake City, UT 84112-9208, USA. Tel.: +1 801
581 4163; Fax: +1 801 585 5261; E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract: This paper compares the ergonomic risk assessment of a task for the
upper extremities as determined by Rapid Upper Extremity Assessment (RULA) and
the Strain Index (SI). The ergonomic risk to the upper extremities of 244
automotive assembly plant tasks were evaluated using RULA and SI. The outcomes
of each tool were compared for each task. Results from this study provide
practical insight into the methods used in each tool. This study compared only
the ergonomic risk outputs from each tool; it does not pursue the question of
which tool best predicts injury. The kappa score was 0.11, indicating little agreement between the
outputs of the two tools. This is supported by the lack of monotonicity with a
gamma score of 0.1. These results indicate that the risk assessment outcome of
these two ergonomic assessment tools for the upper extremities do not
agree.
