Modeling the Impact of Ergonomic Interventions and Occupational Factors on Work-Related Musculoskeletal Disorders in the Neck of Office Workers with Machine Learning Methods.

Background: Modeling with methods based on machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence can help understand the complex relationships between ergonomic risk factors and employee health. The aim of this study was to use ML methods to estimate the effect of individual factors, ergonomic interventions, quality of work life (QWL), and productivity on work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs) in the neck area of office workers. A quasi-randomized control trial.

Methods: To measure the impact of interventions, modeling with the ML method was performed on the data of a quasi-randomized control trial. The data included the information of 311 office workers (aged 32.04±5.34). Method neighborhood component analysis (NCA) was used to measure the effect of factors affecting WMSDs, and then support vector machines (SVMs) and decision tree algorithms were utilized to classify the decrease or increase of disorders.

Results: Three classified models were designed according to the follow-up times of the field study, with accuracies of 86.5%, 80.3%, and 69%, respectively. These models could estimate most influencer factors with acceptable sensitivity. The main factors included age, body mass index, interventions, QWL, some subscales, and several psychological factors. Models predicted that relative absenteeism and presenteeism were not related to the outputs.

Conclusion: In this study, the focus was on disorders in the neck, and the obtained models revealed that individual and management interventions can be the main factors in reducing WMSDs in the neck. Modeling with ML methods can create a new understanding of the relationships between variables affecting WMSDs.