CORRELATIONS IN BETWEEN EAWS AND OCRA
EAWS (European Assembly Worksheet) is a 1st level risk assessment method for biomechanical load of the whole body and upper limbs used mainly in manufacturing industries as a process design tool for preventive ergonomics and adopted in the production departments for biomechanical stress mapping purposes.
EAWS offers compliance with the relevant CEN/ISO standards and it’s structured in four sections, each one covering a specific risk area: Body Postures, Action Forces, Manual Materials Handling and Upper Limbs inrepetitive tasks.
Each section is designed to measure with a score the load level for a given task (workplace) according to the corresponding 2nd level risk detection systems: OWAS for the Body Postures ([2] and [8]), RULA and Snook & Ciriello for the Action Forces ([4] and [7]), NIOSH for the Manual Materials Handling ([3] and [6]) and the OCRA Index and the Toyota System ([5], [9] and [19]) for the Upper Limbs in repetitive tasks.
The introduction of section 4 is the main contribu-tion of EAWS to the ergonomic analysis landscape, considering that EAWS originated from AAWS (Au-tomotive Assembly Worksheet), which missed the
evaluation of the risk area of upper limbs.
