Presenter pada International Conference Series Science and Technology

Abstract

Agriculture is a challenging sector in which farmers have the potential risk of musculoskeletal disorders, since their working conditions required awkward static postures. Likewise in most agricultural work, oyster mushroom farmers also suffered from musculoskeletal disorder. Oyster mushroom cultivation activities mostly use the upper extremities segments and involves stooped posture and repetitive manual task. Therefore, these activities trigger the occurrence of MSD among oyster mushroom farmers. AULA (Agricultural Upper Limb Assessment) and RULA (Rapid Upper Limb Assessment) are two techniques that have frequently used to evaluate the MSD potential risks in upper limb burdening works. This study aims to compare these two ergonomic evaluation tools i.e., AULA and RULA to find the most suitable method for assessing WMSD in oyster mushroom farmers. The comparison was conducted based on the result of experts’ evaluation of 25 activities in the oyster mushroom cultivation process. A total of 12 experienced experts in ergonomics, safety and health, and agriculture were involved in this study, and four oyster mushroom farms in Lempake Samarinda were observed to identify the activities. Hit rate, quadratic weighted κ, and independent t-test were applied to compare the two methods. The result of the hit rate showed that the hit rate of AULA (average: 73%) was higher than RULA (average: 62%). The quadratic weighted of Kappa analysis also showed that the Kappa value of AULA (0.475) was higher than RULA (0.261). Based on these results, AULA has a moderate level of agreement while RULA has a fair level of agreement. Furthermore, the independent t-test test showed the scores of AULA and RULA were not significantly different from experts, as well as AULA score was not significantly different from RULA. These findings concluded that the AULA method would be the appropriate tool to evaluate the WMSDs of oyster mushroom farmers in Samarinda.