Linking the Use of Ergonomics Methods to Workplace Social Sustainability: The Ovako Working Posture Assessment System and Rapid Entire Body Assessment Method

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper focuses on a challenging topic for designing future workplace by sustainably maintaining human well being.
It has some weaknessess that have to be recovered.

Contributions about Industry 4.0 on same topics have to be considered and discussed.
Some frameworks exist, they can be adapted to ergonomics and be complementary to ergonomics based frameworks.

Safety concerns is limited to passive barriers while active ones should be discussed in a context of shared control between users and automated devices. For instance, what's about the use of exoskeleton, of autonomous/semi-autonomous support system?

Environmental concerns seems to be linked or redundant with safety concerns because they related to hazards and accidents. Please clarify.

Well-being factor has to be presented with regard to other factors like ethics or acceptability or preferences.

The paper is limited to physical ergonomics while some elements of the proposed frameworks can affect cognitive ergonomics and factors mentioned above.

On the discussion section, how to prove the sustainability aspect of the approach? This is really no obvious to understand.

Feedback of experience seems an immportant issue of the paper but it is not so well described.
For instance, I noticed this paper that focuses on ethics and on weak signal related to failed users'experience: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-021-00284-y.
Majorities of users may accept the proposed solutions but minorities of users cannot accept or undestand them: how to consider these minorities of people in a individual and social sustainability point of view?
This point has to be discussed with regard to existing studies with such weak signal and ethics because there is no "magic" frameworks with only benefits.

Conclusion has to be rewritten in order to highlight the new contribuions of the authors regarding existing approaches.

The main concern is the proof of the individual and social sustainability of the proposed frameworks

Author Response

We have improved the paper according to the Reviewer 1 recommendations!

Thank you very much! Please check the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper is very well writen and structured with only a few lexical mistakes:

• In the last sentence of the abstract "were summarized" must be at the end of the sentence
• In line 311 - "into as a checklist or as a list" -> "into a checklist or a list"

Some recommendations:

• Use references instead of links (for instance http://summerschool.fl.im.si)
• The terms OWAS and REBA are defined in pages 4 and 5 but are used before. Define them the first time they are used
• In line 170 you should specify which level is low risk and low risk, although it is deduced afterwards
• What is MSD, this acronym is used twice but never defined
• In section 3.1 which is the A categoty? Is there a B category?
• In Figure 5 why are different categories (2, 3 or 5) depending on the graph?
• There are two figure 7. Renumber this figure and the rest of them. Change the numeration in the text
• Try to avoid the blank space in page 10
• Figure 8 (new 9) is splitted into two pages. Try to avoid this.

Author Response

The responses to both reviewers' observations have been carefully analysed and implemented. We have operated the required changes and improvements to the article.

Thank you very much for you support! Please check the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thanks for the improvements of the paper.

The main issue of the revised version is the guarantee of the social sustainability aspects, even if the authors discussed on this limitation.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We appreciate a lot your feedback! Thank you very much for the opportunity to improve our article proposal. We agree with your observations and going in deep with our research argumentation, we conclude that linking ergonomics with the social dimension of the sustainability needs extra investigation (it is a knowledge gap in exploring this relation).

We have changed the title of our article, as suggested previously by the reviewers, to better reflect the research content of our article (and the research approach described).

Under your suggestion: we have added a proposal for a metric by which a company can determine whether a change because of the use of OWAS and REBA improves in part social sustainability. We did not measure this ourselves in the case study because the aim of the approach was to test and validate a combination of ergonomics methods and tools that could be use in effective interventions in the production/manufacturing systems (which has been tested and validated). This is certainly a weak point of our research. Definitely a good starting point for future research … continuing our work.

Thank you very much!

Prof. Anca DRAGHICI, Politehnica University of Timisoara, Romania

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf