Important Info
What is Ergonomics?

Ergonomics is the study of designing equipment and devices that fit the human body, its movements, and its cognitive abilities. At Ergonomics Canada we focus on he human body. furniture is important but our body comes first.


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Breathing for Health: The Physiology of Breathing

Little children experience disorders that affect their breathing patterns. Adults develop breathing style and rhythms have a huge impact on performance.

The way you breathe Breathing affects the oxygen/carbon dioxide balance in the body that affects the health shown that people who practice controlled breathing exercises can reduce discomfort beliefs: one favors deeper breathing and training the body to accept more oxygen.

The We begin this series on breathing with a brief discussion of breathing and how it affects the body. Breathing Basics. breathing, you can change this balance and cause other physical and mental symptoms.


Five aspects of Ergonomics

There are five aspects of ergonomics: safety, comfort, ease of use, productivity/performance, and aesthetics. Based on these aspects of ergonomics, examples are given of how products or systems could benefit from redesign based on ergonomic principles.

  • Safety - Medicine bottles: The print on them could be larger so that a sick person who may have impaired vision (due to sinuses, etc.) can more easily see the dosages and label. Ergonomics could design the print style, color and size for optimal viewing. In a workspace Ergonomics can help reduce costs by improving safety. This would decrease the money paid out in workers’ compensation. For example, over five million workers sustain overextension injuries per year. Through ergonomics, workplaces can be designed so that workers do not have to overextend themselves and the manufacturing industry could save billions in workers’ compensation.
  • Comfort - Alarm clock display: Some displays are harshly bright, drawing one’s eye to the light when surroundings are dark. Ergonomic principles could redesign this based on contrast principles.
  • Ease of use - Street Signs: In a strange area, many times it is difficult to spot street signs. This could be addressed with the principles of visual detection in ergonomics.
  • Productivity/performance - HD TV: The sound on HD TV is much lower than regular TV. So when you switch from HD to regular, the volume increases dramatically. Ergonomics recognizes that this difference in decibel level creates a difference in loudness and hurts human ears and this could be solved by evening out the decibel levels.
  • Aesthetics - Signs in the workplace: Signage should be made consistent throughout the workplace to not only be aesthetically pleasing, but also so that information is easily accessible.

Workplace/Office Ergonomics may also take the reactive/proactive approach when applying ergonomics in the office. With a Proactive ergonomics program, this is the method of seeking areas that can be rehabilitated and fixing these ergonomic issues before they become a bigger problem. Problems may be fixed through ergonomic equipment design or task design. With a Reactive ergonomics program, this is when something needs to be fixed, and corrective action is taken. Ergonomic Equipment design changes the actual, physical devices used by people. Ergonomic task design changes what people do with the equipment. Environmental design changes the environment in which a person works, but not the physical equipment they use.