Incorporating ergonomic and psychosocial stressors: A comprehensive model for assessing miners’ work-related musculoskeletal disorders

•Miners’ WMSDs were assessed incorporating ergonomic and psychosocial stressors.•An expert weight dynamic adjustment algorithm was used to aggregate expert judgments.•Stress responses can be alarming indicators for identifying and preventing WMSDs risk.•Investing in psychosocial resources helps to reduce WMSDs risk. Although the influence of ergonomic and psychosocial stressors on work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs) has been widely recognized, a risk assessment method that comprehensively considers these stressors is still lacking. As such, this study developed a fuzzy Bayesian network (FBN) model that incorporated a comprehensive set of ergonomic and psychosocial stressors to investigate how they interacted to affect frontline miners’ WMSDs risk. A methodology combining fuzzy set theory, Leaky Noisy-OR gate, and an expert weight dynamic adjustment algorithm was employed to deal with fuzziness, uncertainty, limited data, and conflicting judgments and to provide a probabilistic assessment. Meanwhile, the FBN was validated using 10-fold cross-validation through data collected from 542 frontline miners. Results indicated that the probability of frontline miners suffering from WMSDs is 79.7%. Vibration, awkward posture, inadequate organizational support, inadequate organizational justice, and bad organizational culture were the most influential stressors to frontline miners’ WMSDs. The proposed FBN model can be a powerful decision-support tool to improve frontline miners’ musculoskeletal health by managing a more targeted subset of ergonomic and psychosocial stressors.