A psychophysical study to determine maximum acceptable efforts for a thumb abduction task with high duty cycles

Potvin (2012, 'Predicting Maximum Acceptable Efforts for Repetitive Tasks: An Equation Based on Duty Cycle', Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 54 (2), 175-188) developed an equation using psychophysical data to estimate maximum acceptable efforts (MAEs) as a function of duty cycle (DC). However, only ∼6% of the data featured DCs ≥ 0.50. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the MAE equation in the high DC range. We tested a repetitive thumb adduction task with DCs of 0.50, 0.70 and 0.90, at frequencies of both 2 and 6 per minute (n = 6 conditions). Participants were trained for 2 hours and tested for 1 hour on each condition. The MAE decreased with increasing DC, and MAEs at 2/min were higher than those at 6/min. When these current six means were added to the original psychophysical studies, the root-mean squared difference of the MAE equation decreased from 7.23% to 7.05% maximum voluntary contraction. The values from our study are also consistent with those demonstrating physiological evidence of fatigue during both continuous isotonic and high DC tasks.