• Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.153-160
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• 2007

Due to the high occurrence rate of musculoskeletal disorders(MSDs), many Korean companies adopted various assessment tools to evaluate workers' musculoskeletal stress. Using the results of this evaluation, tasks were selected for improvements. However, there are still many workers who complained of musculoskeletal stress of their tasks. Their tasks usually consist of repetitive activities and a short rest cycle. This prompts a concern of reliability of the evaluation tools and especially RULA. Thus in this study, OCRA(The Occupational Repetitive Action tool) was used to check whether RULA(Rapid Upper Limb Assessment) evaluates workers' musculoskeletal stress reasonably well since OCRA has been known to be a good evaluation tool for repetitive tasks and tasks with short recovery periods. The evaluation was conducted on 142 tasks. It was found that 65 tasks showed higher action levels by OCRA than by RULA. However, 13 tasks showed the reversed result and 64 tasks showed the same level regardless of the evaluation tool. It was concluded that either RULA or OCRA alone cannot evaluate all types of tasks very well. It is suggested that OCRA needs to be used with RULA together for the evaluations of musculoskeletal stress at workplaces where repetitive activities and short recovery periods exist.