To most of us, workstation ergonomics seems strange and other-wordly. It is a realm filled with knee-chairs too complicated to sit in, yet complicated enough to fall out of - an adjustable land of left-handed mice and weird, wavy, split keyboards that decrease your words per minute when you type because you can’t figure out where the apostrophe key went. Unfortunately, most of us think these special, ergonomically correct widgets and gadgets create a safe, healthy, “neutral” workstation. Although there are certain parameters that roughly equate to workstation “neutral,” there is no one optimal position in which to accomplish any task. Ideally, roughly every twenty minutes, we stop what we are doing, move, change positions, stretch, and then return to our task invigorated and enthused.

Perhaps saying enthused is too optimistic, but feeling invigorated is a wonderful side effect that occurs after taking one of these mini-breaks. The mini-breaks are also a wonderful form of preventative medicine. One of the most damaging activities for the body’s tissues is static activity. This means that staying in the same position for an extended period destroys body tissue, and over time this damage can lead to debilitating and expensive musculoskeletal disorders, such as chronic low back pain (LBP).

In addition to these mini-breaks, you can keep the body’s tissues healthy and active by changing workstations roughly every 2 hours. Many of us at Riddle consider changing workstations taking our laptop to Starbucks, and then the library, and then back to Lehman. I know I do. Although these shifts in work location are good for us because we get up, walk around, and break the static activity cycle in our muscles that studying induces, we are essentially ending up in the same position after each shift. You are back on your laptop, and laptops are inherently poorly designed from a biomechanical and ergonomic perspective. One of the major ergonomic issues with laptops is that if we have our fingers on the keyboard and or mouse, the screen is much too low and brings our head and neck forward from neutral alignment. This is bad for many reasons, the most important of which is a forward head means bad posture, and bad posture means we age more quickly than we need to. (Good posture is one of the fountains of youth, my friends!) Ideally, when we are in our workstation, we have our head stacked over our shoulders, muscles that shrug the shoulders relaxed, and shoulders stacked over our hips.

Laptop users, here is one fairly easy redesign you can make to help correct this. Get an ergonomically correct, external keyboard. When you are using your laptop, place the keyboard in your lap and your laptop on a stack of books on the table in front of you. This will place your hands, arms, and shoulders in a more biomechanically comfortable position, as well as lift the screen up closer to a line of sight where you can maintain a neutral head and neck alignment. You will feel better and maybe even make a few new friends. Ergonomically correct, external keyboards are great conversation starters.

Vintage Postural Guide - Old School is So Cool!!!

A perfectly straight spine is actually a deviation from spinal neutral, and you would rather have a neutral spine than a straight spine. Trust me. Neutral spine means that there is no compression, or as little as possible, between the vertebrae, which are the boney discs that stack up to collectively make your spinal column. All of the other bones, muscles, tendons, and ligaments that connect to the spine are also more able to be in proper alignment when the spine is in neutral. Most importantly, we also look better when our spines are in neutral. We look ten years younger, ten pounds lighter, and at least an inch taller – maybe two! (These claims are unsubstantiated by rigorous scientific research.)

So, how do you find this functional, free fountain of youth known as neutral spine? Start with the pelvis, of course! If you are seated or standing, you align the anterior superior iliac spine (ASIS), commonly referred to as the hipbones, and the lower, front part of the pelvis so that these landmarks are perpendicular to the floor. If you are lying down, these landmarks would be parallel to the floor. This puts the pelvis in a neutral position, which in turn places the lumbar vertebrae, the low back, into a proper, inward, neutral curve. The mid and upper back, the thoracic spine, can easily fall into a proper, neutral, outward curve, and the neck, the cervical spine, can fall into a proper, neutral, inward curve. To help align the head, we use the shoulders as a guide. To be in neutral, the inner line of the shoulder blades should each be three of your finger’s distance to the spine. Once your shoulders are in this neutral position, your head should be placed so that your earlobes line up with the middle of the shoulder.

All this may seem very anatomically technical, but it doesn’t have to be. Just roughly estimate when you are standing if your knees stack over your ankles, hips over your knees, shoulders over your hips, and ears over your shoulders. Think about your shoulder blades gently relaxing down your back and in toward your spine. Think about the front line of the pelvis in a perpendicular line to the floor, and let that positioning place your low back in its natural inward curve, mid back in its natural outward curve, and neck in its natural inward curve. You are now standing in neutral and keeping the integrity of those big, beautiful spinal curves. Stand up straight? Never again!



I heart Toothpaste for Dinner

I only slightly over exaggerate when I say that everyone I know has a bad back. Actually, 80-85% of all Americans will experience back pain at some point in their lives. Many of my younger friends think their youth will save them, yet back pain is the leading cause of activity limitation for Americans under 45. For Americans over 45, back pain is the third leading cause of disability. Roughly estimated, we spend $50 billion each year on low back disc herniations, which is only one small slice of the back pain pie. Disability due to chronic low back pain is the most expensive benign, medically treated condition in industrialized countries. This means, taking care of our backs equates to personal and fiscal responsibility.

With fiscal responsibility being so popular these days, we should all be motivated to take care of our spines. The only problem is, there is no one cause of back pain. Researchers have conducted many studies over the years to try and pinpoint what causes back pain, in part to relieve some of the pressure placed upon our health care system and in part to help those experiencing the pain feel better. Overwhelmingly, the results of these studies point a blaming finger at occupational and non-occupational “lifestyle” risk factors. Simply speaking, our behaviors and choices regarding how we live our lives cause this very expensive and painful problem.

If there isn’t one specific cause of our back pain, there cannot be one specific treatment to heal our nation. Treatment and prevention must be a many-pronged approach, addressing all levels of our lifestyles, behaviors, and choices. Back care education programs have been deployed by organizations such as The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The programs include information on exercises and stretches for the back, ergonomic principles, stress management, and behavior change and motivation.

In the spirit of these important health education programs, for the next four weeks, be on the look out for follow-up articles regarding back care education. Until next time, here are some very simple things we can do right now to be good to our spines:

1. Lighten the load! Carry as little as possible in your bag and or backpack.
2. Wear sensible shoes. Ladies, this means no heels! Beach bums, this means no slippers or flip-flops.
3. Get up and move around every 20 minutes or so. Professors may hate me for this, but students will love me!
4. Take some time every day to relax, take deep breaths, and be happy. Actually, take a lot of time each day to do this.



Think of commercial space flight. What comes to mind? The average person, I’m sure, pictures Sir Richard Branson, Sir Elton John and Paris Hilton struggling to drink their floating martinis in a cabin straight out of the latest James Bond movie. Human factors specialists are certainly not average! When we think of commercial space flight, fun, exciting, complicated, and challenging problems and opportunities for further research come to mind. A popular challenge is: how do we create medical screening protocol for passengers? Another: how do we design passenger seats for different body dimensions and to help deal with the physiological reactions to acceleration? And yet another: how do we accommodate the passengers most able to pay the exorbitant fees to take a commercial space flight, i.e. older, wealthy individuals with a less than perfect bill of health, without giving them heart attacks during their joy ride?

Although the last question doesn’t pertain to Paris Hilton…yet…you hopefully get my point. Humans are adapted for life on earth – specifically life on earth’s surface. Take us too low, like below the ocean’s surface, or too high, like on a commercial space flight, and bad things happen to our bodies. Our bodies function best at 1 g, which for the common folk means the amount of gravity the earth exerts on you when you fall. You can say it fancier ways, like g = 978.0495 [1 + 0.0052892 sin2(p) - 0.0000073 sin2 (2p)] centimeters per second squared at sea level at latitude p, but let’s leave the fancy stuff for the physicists. When we float in space, we float near 0 g.  When we fall, ride on roller coasters, or go on a commercial space flight, we experience more than 1 g. More than 1 g can cause major harm to our bodies, especially for older people with heart conditions, who can afford to hang out in space with Sir Richard Branson.

And herein lies an interesting conundrum for the commercial space flight industry and a perfect problem for human factors specialists to tackle. There are many online resources you can visit to learn more about these human factors specialists making the final frontier safe for the human race, such as www.thespacereview.com. Or, come to the Human Factors department. We are on the third floor in Lehman. Dr. Kring and Dr. French can tell you amazing stories about the body in space and extreme environments, and graduate students like Bill Warren and Jenissa Garcia can tell you about inspiring advances in the industry. We may not have floating martinis, but we have a really good coffee maker. We hope you stop by.

The Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company

“Hi, Ashley. I’m remembering my posture, see?” they say to me.

I just have to laugh. I teach Yoga and Pilates classes here on campus, assistant teach the undergraduate ergonomics class, and am known in my department for sitting in a “knee chair” to help with my posture. It seems that my very presence inspires good posture in my friends, students, and colleagues. There is a name for this phenomenon within the human factors field. It is called the Hawthorne effect.

The famous Hawthorne effect got its name from a series of experiments carried out in the 1920s and 30s atThe Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company Interior the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company. The researchers originally set out to test the effects of rest pauses, shorter hours, and illumination on worker productivity and fatigue. What they found was something quite different from their original intentions. In one manipulation, the researchers dimmed the lighting and recorded the effects on production. Then, they increased the lighting and recorded the effects on production. No matter what the manipulation of the lights, output increased. The researchers drew the conclusion that whenever the lighting changed, the workers remembered that they were part of an experiment and worked harder. The specific manipulation did not affect worker behavior, but the presence of researchers did.

The Hawthorne effect has earned an important place in the areas of human factors, organizational psychology, and related fields. It drew researchers’ attention to the fact that personal and social factors play a greater role than physical factors in determining worker productivity. Human factors specialists carry this importance with them as they evaluate or create industrial and technical systems and designs. Even if we don’t consider the Hawthorne effect, it will consider us, as in the case The Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company Exteriorof posture and my presence around campus. Although a physical factor in design, such as an ergonomically correct office chair, could help someone maintain good posture and therefore prevent back pain, having your ergonomics or Yoga instructor walk by seems a much more effective way to encourage you to take care of your spine. The Hawthorne effect. Know it. Love it. Use it to your advantage.



“Human factors.”

“Really, wow…human factors…I’ve never met any of you people before. What exactly are human factors?”

I’m really good at answering this question. On my very first day of graduate school, my professors drilled into my brain that one of our responsibilities as human factors professionals is to spread the word about our chosen field. “Have you ever heard of ergonomics?”

“Yeah. I think my chair has one of those.”

“Ergonomics and human factors are more or less synonymous, but the human factors field covers a lot more than just office chair design. We design products and systems for human use. We adapt technology, things, and systems to people, not the other way around, and draw from a lot of other disciplines, like engineering, psychology, physiology, and anthropology.”

“Do you guys figure out where the buttons go on cell phones?”

“Yeah, we do that, too.”

“So, why is there a human factors department at Riddle? I thought this was an aeronautical university?”

Again, another good question. I asked myself this when I was applying to graduate programs in human factors and saw that Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University housed a department in my field. A little internet investigation serves up the answer sufficiently, but I will explain further here since I already have your attention. Although a few examples of human factors-like analysis and design pop up here and there in history, especially after the Industrial Revolution swept across the globe, the field as we know it today was born alongside aviation and grew up during World War II. You can think of aviation and human factors like twins. Fraternal twins. Human factors would be slightly less popular of the two.

In the early days of aviation, only the bold, daring, and slightly suicidal would attempt to fly. Today, it is one of the safest modes of transportation. We can attribute much of that improvement to human factors professionals and principles. One famous example of an early human factors redesign happened during World War II. Many accidents occurred with particular types of military aircraft, such as B-17s, B-25s, and p-47s, and renowned human factors pioneer, Alphonse Chapanis discovered the root cause of these accidents and devised a clever solution. He realized that the switches and levers for the landing gear wheels and flaps were positioned next to each other and looked identical, and the pilots were pulling the wrong lever at the wrong time. This, of course, led to numerous accidents. At the time, moving the levers and switches farther apart was not an option due to wartime temporal and budget constraints, so he fashioned a small, rubber wheel to attach to the lever that controlled the landing gear wheels and a wing-shaped wedge to attach to the lever that controlled the flaps. This way, pilots could easily detect by sight or by touch which lever controlled the landing gear wheels and which lever controlled the flaps. Of course, the number of accidents in these aircraft went down exponentially, these shape codes became standard on aircraft globally, Chapanis became a hero, and human factors assumed its place as the champion of the human being in the technological revolution.





Best,

Ash

I am looking forward to the upcoming semester.

Best,

Ash

Abstract

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU) houses an excellent Human Factors and Systems (HFS) department, which is often called upon to give ergonomic assessments. Yet, they have not yet developed an ergonomic assessment training program. We will develop said program, which will be called Ergonomic Assessments 101 – A Human-Centered Approach to Workplace Health (EA101). EA101 will act as a learning tool for HFS students, improve workplace safety and health for ERAU faculty and staff, deepen the educational and research opportunities through the HFS department, and raise funds to pay for members of the ERAU Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) chapter to attend the HFES conference in the fall.

Click here to continue reading about EA101.