Visual Fatigue with Work on Visual Display Units: The Current State of Knowledge

Abstract

Visual fatigue is the most frequent health complaint of visual display unit (VDU) workers. In field studies on office populations reported frequencies of complaints vary between 30% and 90%. In addition, many workers are afraid that their eyes may deteriorate through VDU work. On the other hand, visual fatigue is also a common health complaint with other types of work. In "classical" office ppulations the frequency of complaints varies between 20% and 60%. This paper is primarily devoted to the question of what is known about the possible causes of the increased frequency of visual fatigue with VDU work (see the section on research), but first the symptoms, mechanisms, and methods of measuring visual fatigue will be discussed, and a survey of the visually problematic conditions in VDU work will be presented. Special attention is given to research contributions from The Netherlands. In the final section it is concluded that knowledge in this field is limited and suggestions for future research are presented.