ABSTRACT
Working tasks that require manual repetitive actions at high frequency may cause the risk of fatigue, discomfort, and musculoskeletal disorders. A proper risk assessment and management should seek to minimize these health effects by considering a variety of risk factors related to the duration of exposure, the frequency of actions, the use of force, the postures and movements of the body segments, the lack of recovery periods, and other additional factors (Colombini et al., 2001). To this regard, two parallel standards have been produced in 2007, respectively, by CEN and ISO: EN 1005-5: Safety of machinery—Human physical performance—Part 5: Risk assessment for repetitive handling at high frequency (CEN, 2007) and ISO 11228-3: Manual handling Part 3: Handling of low loads at high frequency (ISO 11228-3, 2007). Though the two mentioned drafts are devoted to different targets, they are conceptually similar and can be presented in the same context.
