Evaluating factors that influence hand-arm stress while operating an electric screwdriver

This paper compares and contrasts four fatigue allowance worksheets commonly used to establish fatigue (relaxation) allowances for production standards; the factors, weights, degree of documentation and other operational characteristics of these worksheets are also examined. We briefly review the fatigue literature including objective physical measures of fatigue. Results of an experiment in which 11 industrial engineers independently applied the four worksheets to a standardized job analysis and video tape of a grocery order selector are reported. We conclude that inter-rater reliability and cross-validation are very low for the four worksheets and suggest validation studies using objective physiological measures of fatigue would be appropriate.