ABSTRACT
Monotonous activities involving repetitive hand and finger movements at low force levels are increasingly common in our daily life, both in terms of numbers of people exposed to these activities and in terms of individual exposure times. This shift is mainly due to the widespread automation of work processes promoting activities like computer work in offices and other settings, joy-stick steering and control in construction, distribution, transport, refuse collecting, and light pickand-place tasks in manufacturing. The frequent use of computers at home, when surfing on the Internet, e-mailing, chatting, and gaming, further contributes to this phenomenon.
