Explainable machine learning framework to predict the risk of work-related neck and shoulder musculoskeletal disorders among healthcare professionals

This study aims to develop risk prediction models for neck and shoulder musculoskeletal disorders among healthcare professionals. A stratified sampling method was employed to select employees from medical institutions in Nanning City, yielding 617 samples. The Boruta algorithm was used for feature selection, and various models, including Tree-Based Models, Single Hidden-Layer Neural Network Models (MLP), Elastic Net Models (ENet), and Support Vector Machines (SVM), were applied to predict the selected variables, utilizing SHAP algorithms for individual-level local explanations. The SVM model excels in both Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and exhibits more stable performance when generalizing to unseen data. The Random Forest model exhibited relatively high overall performance on the training set. The MLP model emerges as the most consistent and accurate in predicting shoulder musculoskeletal disorders, while the SVM model shows strong fitting capabilities during the training phase, with occupational factors identified as the main contributors to WMSDs. This study successfully constructs work-related musculoskeletal disorder risk prediction models for healthcare professionals, enabling a quantitative analysis of the impact of occupational factors. This advancement is beneficial for future economical and convenient work-related musculoskeletal disorder screening in healthcare professions.