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Review: Metabolic energy cost of workers in agriculture, construction, manufacturing, tourism, and transportation industries

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posted on 2018-07-24, 10:07 authored by Konstantina Poulianiti, George HavenithGeorge Havenith, Andreas Flouris
The assessment of energy cost (EC) at the workplace remains a key topic in occupational health due to the ever-increasing prevalence of work-related issues. This review provides a detailed list of EC estimations in jobs/tasks included in tourism, agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and transportation industries. A total of 61 studies evaluated the EC of 1667 workers while performing a large number of tasks related to each one of the aforementioned five industries. Agriculture includes the most energy-demanding jobs (males: 6.0±2.5 kcal/min; females: 2.9±1.0 kcal/min). Jobs in the construction industry were the 2nd most demanding (males: 4.9±1.6 kcal/min; no data for females). The industry with the 3rd highest EC estimate was manufacturing (males: 3.8±1.1 kcal/min; females: 3.0±1.3 kcal/min). Transportation presented relatively moderate EC estimates (males: 3.1±1.0 kcal/min; no data for females). Tourism jobs demonstrated the lowest EC values (2.5±0.9 kcal/min for males and females). It is hoped that this information will aid the development of future instruments and guidelines aiming to protect workers’ health, safety, and productivity. Future research should provide updated EC estimates within a wide spectrum of occupational settings taking into account the sex, age, and physiological characteristics of the workers as well as the individual characteristics of each workplace.

Funding

The present work has received support through funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 668786 (HEAT-SHIELD).

History

School

  • Design

Published in

Industrial Health

Citation

POULIANITI, K., HAVENITH, G. and FLOURIS, A., 2019. Review: Metabolic energy cost of workers in agriculture, construction, manufacturing, tourism, and transportation industries. Industrial Health, 57(3), pp. 283-305.

Publisher

© National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2018-07-19

Publication date

2018-07-28

Notes

This is an Open Access Article. It is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

ISSN

0019-8366

eISSN

1880-8026

Language

  • en

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