Upper limb disorders and hand-arm vibration risks with hand-held olive beaters

Olive harvesting with hand-held beaters is a repetitive work, tiring and time consuming (more than 4-5 h/day). Operators work with vibrating tools in not natural body postures: they are therefore exposed to various risks, especially at the upper limbs. Unfortunately, also if in the agriculture sector the number of the declared upper limb disorders increased in the last years, hand-arm vibration and incongruent upper limb postures are not yet well perceived. In this work, the hand-arm vibration exposure and the OCRA index were calculated for five operators which used three different electric olive beaters. In all the observed tests both the hand-arm vibration and the OCRA scores produced results over the admitted limits. A(8) ranged between 8.6 ms(-2) and 25.4 ms(-2), far from the 5 ms(-2) daily exposure limit values admitted by the European law (European Directive 2002/44). The OCRA checklist values ranged from a minimum value of 13.32 (red light level and light risk) for the left limb and a maximum of 34.41 (violet, high level and high risk) for the right limb.