The occupational health and safety risks of ongoing digital transformation. A knowledge management software powered literature review

The fast technical-organizational transformation undergoing, promoted by Industry 4.0 as well as other similar initiatives, partly sped up due to the Covid-19 pandemic, is radically changing actors, modes, and environments of human work. Although part of these innovations is directed at occupational health and safety (OHS), some scholars raise reasonable doubts, arguing that the same innovations even if they solve some problems, could create new ones. The 4th industrial revolution is likely introducing entirely new categories of worker risks. This review explores the evidence base that supports the latter hypothesis. Besides, it proposes an innovative and potentially useful combination of methods and computer applications. By applying the Prisma methodology, tagging one-by-one activity, and hyperlinks, the paper proposes a knowledge graph explorable in terms of semantic, logical and chronological links as well as argumentative. In the final phase, the paper synthesizes in a meta-annotation ten recurring themes and clusters that emerged in this bottom-up process of knowledge elicitation.