The Human Factor
Many office workers associate ergonomics with chairs. Modern office chairs, designed for the comfort of computer users, have enough hydraulic lifts, lumbar supports and sliding seat pans to make Captain Kirk comfortable.
And now there is Ergomax.
The chair, invented by Sausalito, Calif., engineer Hector Serber, has seven independently adjustable parts.
The back rest can swing forward to be used as a chest support. The foot rest adjusts upward to be used as a kneeling support. Even the cushions are ergonomically engineered to “insure proper skin surface circulation and comfort,” an advertising brochure says.
Tony Richards, an architect with offices in the same building as Serber’s firm, American Ergonomics, swears by the Ergomax.
Richards has suffered back pain since a car wreck nine years ago. But after five months of sitting in an Ergomax while he designs houses, “it’s relieved my back quite a bit,” he said.
The asking price for one of the few ergonomic devices manufactured in California? A cool $1,000 per chair.
A good chair alone does not an ergonomically sound office make, though. Human factors experts say too many companies believe that they have met the health and comfort needs of employees merely by purchasing furniture and computer equipment with ergonomic features.
If the employees’ wishes have not been taken into account in the equipment’s acquisition, however, dissatisfaction is likely, said Richard P. Koffler, a Santa Monica ergonomics consultant who specializes in office issues.
“You could have work stations everyone hated except the people who installed them,” he said.
Companies often fail to give workers instruction on using their high-tech chairs and table tops. “I’ve seen numerous times where you have great looking ergonomic furniture--state of the art--and nobody’s told the employees how to adjust it,” said David B. Keller, a San Diego consultant in ergonomics and environmental health. “It’s not worth a hoot.”
Just about anyone can hold himself out as an expert in human factors--and just about everyone does. By its nature, the field is multidisciplinary.
Members of the Human Factors Society hold degrees in psychology, engineering, ergonomics, industrial design, physiology, medicine, education, business administration, computer science and other specialties.
No government agency licenses or registers ergonomists. And the Santa Monica-based society last year rejected the notion of credentialing human factors specialists, on grounds that it would be too costly to do the job well.
The society has moved, however, to accredit college human factors programs and to increase the minimum field experience required for society membership.
Nonetheless, some practitioners wish claims of expertise in human factors were more tightly regulated.
“As usual, where there’s money to be made, a lot of people are out there saying, ‘I’m an ergonomist,’ ” said Rani K. Lueder, president of Humanics, a consulting firm in Agoura Hills, and the holder of a master’s degree in human factors. “They may be nothing more than an interior designer or an office equipment salesman.”
More and more ergonomists are taking the oath. In personal injury and product liability lawsuits, both plaintiffs and defense lawyers are calling upon human factors specialists to act as expert witnesses.
In litigation over an industrial accident, the ergonomist might explain why, after years of using a machine, a worker caught his hand in the mechanism, explained Gordon H. Robinson, a retired professor of industrial engineering who now has a forensic ergonomics consulting practice in Laguna Beach.
In a car accident case, the ergonomist could offer testimony on research into human reaction time or people’s failure to heed warnings, providing a scientific explanation for phenomena that in the past juries might have done no better than speculate upon, he said.
“It’s just a more sophisticated cut at something we would now view as having been rather trivially handled,” said Robinson, chairman of the Human Factors Society’s 260-member forensics professionals section.
