Mechanical vibration - Guideline for the assessment of exposure to hand-transmitted vibration using available information including that provided by manufacturers of machinery
This Technical Report gives guidelines for estimating, assessing and documenting the daily vibration
exposure due to the use of hand-held power tools and hand-guided machines, according to the requirements
of the European Physical Agents Directive (vibration) 2002/44/EC. This Technical Report is addressed to
competent services for the assessment of vibration exposure at the workplace and to national authorities and
industrial organizations. It helps to establish documentation for specific machinery or work situations and can
also be useful for employers.
It follows the method of EN ISO 5349-1 and EN ISO 5349-2 but instead of measuring the vibration magnitudes
at the specific workplaces, the methods in this Technical Report use existing vibration values from other
sources of information including those provided by the manufacturers of the machinery according to the
requirements of the Machinery Directive 98/37/EC. It is important that the vibration values used in the
exposure assessment are representative of those in the specific use of the machinery. Workplace
measurements, however, are required if suitable data are not available to represent the vibration under the
specific working conditions or if the calculation results do not help to decide whether or not the vibration
exposure limit value or exposure action value is likely to be exceeded.
This Technical Report gives guidance on how to estimate the exposure duration and the daily vibration
exposure A(8) as defined in EN ISO 5349-1. It also offers a simple method for estimating the daily vibration
exposure by means of a table which indicates the vibration exposure as a function of the equivalent vibration
total value and the associated exposure duration. Both methods can be used even in cases of multiple
exposures on the same day.
Annex A gives guidance for manufacturers and suppliers of machinery concerning information that warns of
risks from vibration, which should be reported to the customer.