Platformised digital agriculture and technostress: implications for psychosocial occupational safety and health

Digitalisation in agriculture is increasingly structured through platformisation: daily work is mediated by interconnected sensors, dashboards, notification pipelines, and vendorgoverned service ecosystems. While automation and data-driven management can reduce physical workload and enable more flexible work organisation, platform-mediated arrangements may also increase psychosocial occupational safety and health (OSH) risks by reshaping temporality, interpretive responsibility, predictability, and practical agency. This article aims to explain how platform-mediated arrangements in digital agriculture generate technostress-related psychosocial OSH demands and to identify design and governance levers that may mitigate these risks in welfare- and time-critical settings. The study presents a theory-guided integrative review (narrative synthesis) using empirical ‘evidence anchors’; it is not a meta-analysis and does not provide pooled effect estimates, prevalence measures, or sector-wide quantitative inference. From a prior systematic review corpus, eleven scholarly sources (2004–2023) - primarily on automatic milking systems and related monitoring infrastructures - were selected and synthesised to identify recurring sociotechnical arrangements. The analysis yields a platform-architecture model linking work reorganisation to technostress appraisals clustered around four patterns: (1) availability pressures under always-on monitoring, (2) interpretive burden under opaque outputs and epistemic asymmetry, (3) constrained agency under proprietary service and update pathways, and (4) intensified self-evaluation under metricised dashboards. Framing technostress as an upstream outcome of platform-mediated work organisation clarifies why psychosocial OSH cannot be addressed through individual adaptation alone: risk depends on how platform design and governance allocate urgency, distribute uncertainty, and shape access to expertise, support, and repair. The article therefore proposes contestability - users’ capacity to inspect, adjust, and stabilise platform mechanisms - as a practical mitigation principle for OSH-sensitive digitalisation.