Evaluation of vibration emission values of nailers: Can an automatic test stand be used instead of human operators?

To protect workers, it is necessary to characterize the noise and vibration emissions value of nailers. Standardized characterization methods exist but require three trained human operators, which leads to a dispersion in the results and a difficult implementation. An automatic test stand (ATS) was developed to characterize those values without the participation of human operators. It is proposed here that we compare the results obtained by the two methods. Preliminary results suggest that further refinement of the ATS is needed to better mimic the biodynamics of the human hand–arm and that a larger number of operators would be required for validation.