Occupational safety and health in Europe - state and trends 2023 
European Agency for Safety and Health at Work – EU-OSHA 105 
workers and those with care duties at home. Digitalisation also offers opportunities for more effective 
OSH training, advanced workplace risk assessment, communication and OSH inspections.  
Digital technologies can worsen the OSH situation at workplaces. Depending on how technologies 
are designed and implemented, on the organisational context and on the employment status, 
digitalisation may result in workers being more exposed to OSH risks such as ergonomic and 
psychosocial risks, with an increase in work -related stress, increasing performance pressure and work 
complexity, facilitating irregular working hours, reducing social interaction and support at work, blurred 
boundaries between work and private life, and new forms of dislocated work with unclear employment 
status. Technical concerns relate to aspects like safe interaction of work ers with robots and semi -
autonomous machines and vehicles. The extensive use of data has the potential to harm privacy 
interests. Digitalisation can create abrupt (disruptive) and emerg ing changes at workplaces and 
with that very different challenges for OSH.275 Eurofound summarised the opportunities and risks of ICT-
based mobile work in a table format.276  
 
Table 27: Opportunities and risks of ICT-based mobile work – Eurofound 
 
EU-OSHA observes particular risks for safety and health in: 277 
• low standards of OSH (particularly ergonomic) in mobile and home-based work,  
• safety of robots, cobots and autonomous vehicles, 
• platform work with low OSH standards,  
• enhanced and detailed surveillance,  
• permanent availability, and 
• physical inactivity, permanent sitting and focusing on digital equipment.  
 
EU-OSHA included in its ESENER 2019 survey several questions regarding digitalisation and OSH in 
enterprises. There is a great diversity when it comes to the types of digital technologies reported by the 
establishments. PCs at fixed workplaces (86% of surveyed establishments in the EU27) and laptops, 
tablets, smartphones or other mobile devices (77%) are frequently reported across all activity sectors 
and business size classes. Only 6% of surveyed establishments in the EU27 reported using none of the 
digital technologies.278