Development and administration of a postural and ergonomic assessment tool: a pilot study

AbstractIntroduction Prevention of occupational diseases depends on the identification of risk factors, which can be complemented by the functional assessment of workers.Objective The aim of this study was to develop a postural and ergonomic assessment tool for the analysis of subjects’ sitting posture at the computer workstation.Materials and methods This is a quantitative, descriptive, observational, cross-sectional study. Eighty-two employees in the administrative sector of FIERGS were invited to participate in the study. The mean age was 32.8 ± 7.7 years. The IAPE (Instrumento de Avaliação Postural Ergonômica [Postural and Ergonomic Assessment Tool]) development and administration process was performed in four stages: 1) observation of the most commonly adopted postures by employees in the workplace; 2) development of the first version of the IAPE; 3) content validation by two ergonomics experts and content validity index (CVI) calculation; 4) inter-evaluator reproducibility assessment. Reproducibility was assessed by Wilcoxon test and intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) (p