Measuring low back injury risk factors in challenging work environments: An evaluation of cost and feasibility

Abstract

Costs and successful field performance need to be weighed against the added data detail gained from monitoring equipment when making choices about exposure assessment techniques for epidemiological studies.

Prediction of objectively measured physical activity and sedentariness among blue-collar work using survey questionnaires

“…In this line of development, we encourage paying consideration to the trade-off between resources required to collect predictors and the eventual performance of the model. We did not in the present study compare costs associated with collecting exposure data directly by objective measurements versus costs of developing prediction models using questionnaire data, but we emphasize that a major rationale for modeling exposures in future studies would be that they deliver more exposure data at a lower cost than objective measurements, and thus represent a favorable trade-off between cost and performance (57,58). We also emphasize the need for validating the performance of any future model in new datasets, either using a genuinely new sample or by internal bootstrap validation techniques; this has very rarely been attempted in previous modelling studies (41).…”

Cost-efficient assessment of biomechanical exposure in occupational groups, exemplified by posture observation and inclinometry

“…In order to appreciate this trade-off and decide which measurement method to prefer from a cost-efficiency point of view, costs and efficiency must be quantified for each measurement class under realistic data collection scenarios and then compared (18). However, there have been few comprehensive efforts to report the empirical costs of biomechanical exposure assessment, and these preliminary efforts did not include any information on the quality or statistical properties of exposure information delivered (35)(36)(37). Recently some studies have combined empirical costs and precision of occupational exposure estimates, although these have addressed cost efficiency in general terms (20), or have focused on a narrow assessment of cost and compared sampling or analysis strategies just within a single method [in casu, observation; (19,21)].…”

Questionnaire on body awareness of postural habits in young people: construction and validation

“…The methods can be classified as: self-reports; observations by trained researchers; and measurements by monitoring equipment [21,22]. Interviews (self-reports) have, as advantages over the other methods, the possibility of greater coverage in the observation of a larger number of data and dimensions of the same event, higher rate of success (related to the sample size), lower cost, and the fact that they are less susceptible to environmental interferences [23].…”