Matheson Philosophy on Workplace Safety and Work Injury Evaluation

Free Ergonomics E-Book: Special Populations and Human Factors

  

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The concept of a normal person underlies standard industrial practice in North American and European countries. Most ergonomics knowledge applies to “regular adults” in the age range from 20 to 50 years. Regular working adults are considered people qualified, fully trained, and able satisfactorily to perform any and all phases of the work under customary conditions at a pace representative of average.

There is a need to accommodate groups who are “extra-ordinary” as well:

Expectant Mothers

Children

The Elderly

Small and Big Persons

The Disabled

The basic task is, first, to identify the critical human attribute (sometimes several) and, second, to accommodate.

However, before identifying attributes the differences between men and women should be addressed:

• Mobility in body joints is generally and marginally greater in women.
• On average girls and women are more skillful than boys and men on perceptual and psychomotor tests such as color perception, aiming and dotting, finger dexterity, inverted alphabet printing and card sorting.
• As a rule, males perfrom slightly better in speed-realted tasks, on the rotary pursuit apparatus, and in other simple rhythmic eye-hand skills.
• Girls and women commonly have lower absolute auditory thresholds for pure tones than boys and men.
• Aging men generally have larger hearing losses than women of the same age.
• In vision, both static and dynamic, boys and men usually have better acuity than girls and women.
• With increasing age, females tend to have more vision deficiencies; acuity especially, declines earlier in females than males.
• In gustation (taste) many women detect sweet, sour, salty, and bitter stimuli at lower concentrations than mem can
• In olfaction (smell) women can usually detect some substances more easily than men can.
• Both taste and smell capabilities and preferences vary within female menstrual cycle and pregnancy.
• In cutaneous senses, the genders exhibit little difference in the thresholds for temperature sensations.
• Regarding touch, the sensitivity to vibration is about the same.

In conclusion, with respect to equipment and task design, interindividual variability overshadows by far any existing differences between the group of so-called regular adult men and women. Thus, there are no gender-specific traits that require design of workstations or work tools exclusively for either men or women.

Download our free 13-page e-book to learn to identify the critical human attributes of the "extra-ordinary" populations and how to accommodate them by using ergonomics. This e-book, which is an actual chapter from our course manual for the Matheson Ergonomic Evaluation Certification Program, will also give you a sneak peek into the knowledge our students come away with when they attend our in-depth ergonomic assessment training.

The resource cited in this e-book is:

"Extra-Ordinary" Ergonomics: How to Accommodate Small and Big Persons, The Disabled and Elderly, Expectant Mothers, and Children by Karl. H. E. Kroemer

For further reading, please check out:

Bodyspace: anthropometry, ergonomics, and the design of work by Taylor & Francis Group.

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