The ability of limited exposure sampling to detect effects of interventions that reduce the occurrence of pronounced trunk inclination

The role of assessment of biomechanical exposure at the workplace in the prevention of musculoskeletal disorders

“…Commonly adopted strategies often fail to detect an intervention's effect on the overall biomechanical exposure in some jobs due to the fact that too few measurements have been collected. It has been shown that, even for large differences in biomechanical exposure, a substantial number of measurements is required (13) and that limited exposure sampling may result in a low probability of detecting any intervention effect at all (14).…”

The Effectiveness of a Lumbopelvic Monitor and Feedback Device to Change Postural Behavior: A Feasibility Randomized Controlled Trial

“…Numerous studies have focused on methods for assessing the effect of ergonomic interventions on postural exposure. 7,27,53 Due to variability within and between subjects, 30 it is recommended that postural samples be gathered across multiple days, as this may improve the statistical power for detecting the intervention effect. 29 The present study attempted to continuously record workers' postural exposure during working hours over a period of 6 weeks.…”

Detailed assessment of low-back loads may not be worth the effort: A comparison of two methods for exposure-outcome assessment of low-back pain

“…High within-subject variability as compared to between-subject variability in a pre-defined group of workers is common (Allread et al, 2000;Paquet et al, 2005), which attenuates the estimated LBP risk (i.e., OR) towards one (Mathiassen et al, 2010;Tielemans et al, 1998). Therefore, group-based approaches are often used in studies on exposure-outcome associations (e.g., Burdorf et al, 2006;Heederik et al, 2000) and have been shown to be an effective way to deal with this within-subject variability (Houba et al, 1997;Lyles et al, 1997).…”

“…As an example, although self-reports of physical exposure are frequently used as they can be obtained with relative ease and few expenses, outcomes are highly subjective and often based on rough categorization, thereby limiting accuracy (Balogh et al, 2004;Punnett, 2004). As a result, in theory, the choice of such methods in view of available resources, is expected to affect accuracy of exposure estimates which may bias risk associations (Tielemans et al, 1998) and reduce statistical power (Mathiassen et al, 2002(Mathiassen et al, , 2010. However, in practice, this is not always the case in epidemiological literature, since studies that measure more accurately often measure limited amounts of subjects which reduces the power of the given study (Griffith et al, 2012).…”