This paper presents a new practitioner-friendly distal upper extremity tool (DUET) based on fatigue failure theory. The tool requires only assessment of force exertion (using the OMNI-RES scale) and the number of repetitions performed to derive DUE risk. Validation of this tool was performed against six separate DUE outcomes from an epidemiological database involving data obtained from 1,022 participants across 738 jobs from several automotive manufacturing plants. The DUET Cumulative Damage (CD) measure explained between 79-95% of the deviance for the six DUE outcomes in logistic regression analyses.
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