Maximum effort and repetitive tasks [Article]

I thought this was interesting as the objective of the effort was to “develop an equation, for repetitive tasks, that uses frequency and/or duty cycle (DC) to predict maximum acceptable efforts (MAE) relative to maximum voluntary efforts (MVE).

Huh? Exactly.

I found this at CafeErgo:

“...maximum acceptable effort refers to a maximum force that is normalized (and a percentage) of a maximum voluntary effort. Duty cycle is the percentage of time (of the total working time) that is spent performing a specific task.

After performing a review of the literature the author included eight psychophysical studies for a total of 69 different tasks and 117 different participants. When the relationship between the maximum acceptable effort and the duty cycle was compared for 69 tasks a strong negative relationship (R2=.87) was found. What this means is that for tasks that consume a larger part of your working time (higher duty cycle) the corresponding maximum acceptable efforts should be lower.

A simplified version of the equation is:
Maximum Acceptable Effort = 1-Duty Cycle^0.24

One of the assumptions with this formula is that a maximum acceptable effort can only be produced once per day and that the maximum duty cycle considered was 90%. The exponent 0.24 was the strongest predictor that came out of a stepwise regression analysis that evaluated exponent values from 0.05 to 0.45 in steps of 0.01.”

I wonder if you can apply this type of equation inside an inpatient pharmacy, say like in the IV room?

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