Ergonomics

Abstract

Ergonomics addresses both improving performance and reducing incidence and severity of injuries. The bulk of injuries confronting industry are attributed to overexertion that produces a mosaic of biomechanical, metabolic, and thermal strain. Mechanistically, such injuries are caused by failure to recognize some hazards, poor work design, and equipment use strategies, presenting excessively demanding motor tasks from an information processing, biomechanical and work physiological perspective, or when performing work in excessively stressful thermal environments. The human concomitantly considers and adapts to perceptual, cognitive, motor, biomechanical, metabolic and thermal stresses in a complex and time-variant manner. These stressors can be identified if one comprehensively examines the interfaces among task demands, human capabilities, the working environment, and machine design. Injury epidemiological efforts that fail to evaluate what the human is evaluating are likely to prove myopic in design and produce weak outcomes. The systematic approach advocated for the evaluation of overexertion injuries, and cited studies and models, may be mapped onto other injury outcomes linked to poor ergonomic design.