Introduction: The purpose of this study was to validate the agricultural lower limb assessment (ALLA) ergonomic checklist, which was developed for various agricultural tasks in Korea.
Methods: One hundred and ninety-six working postures were selected from the real agricultural tasks to verify ALLA, a lower limb body posture assessment tool, and then evaluated by 16 ergonomic experts. Hit rate, quadratic weighted κ, one-way analysis of variance and t-test analyses were applied to compare ALLA with other assessment tools.
Results: ALLA analysis had a superior hit rate with ergonomic expert assessment compared with other assessment tools. Quadratic weighted κ analysis also showed that ALLA provided superior estimates of risk levels for farm working postures.
Discussion: ALLA would be an appropriate assessment tool to estimate risk factors for various lower limb body postures which frequently occur in agricultural tasks in Korea. ALLA is a simple and accurate risk assessment tool that could be usefully applied to identify and mitigate risk factors and work-related musculoskeletal disorders in agricultural tasks, and also to evaluate the effects of control and intervention for working conditions.
Keywords: Ovako working posture analysis system; agricultural lower limb assessment; ergonomic risk assessment tools; rapid entire body assessment; rapid upper limb assessment.