Abstract
The discomfort due to poor sitting posture may be related to the lack of suitability of the furniture. This miss-match is often due to the lack of consideration for ergonomic aspects that ensure the combination of anthropometric dimensions of users with the measures of the furniture. These miss-match situations can also be seen in the student work environment, where students spend a lot of time sitting at a desk. The aim of this study was to evaluate if students, who attend a Portuguese public school of elementary education, 2nd and 3rd cycles, use furniture with measures fitting their anthropometric measurements. For this purpose, the anthropometric measurements of all the students, as well as measurements of all tables and chairs from this school were collected. Taking as reference the European standard 1729-1: 2015, it was verified that 73% of the students don’t find a chair/table compatible with their anthropometric dimensions.
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Acknowledgments
The achievement of this work was only possible thanks to the receptivity of Chief Executive Officer to this problem. It is also worth noting the participation of all students as well as the involvement of their parents. A final note of thanks to the teachers of the discipline of Physical Education, for the availability of the time of their classes and collaboration in the logistics of collecting the measures.
This work has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013.
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Fernandes, A., Carneiro, P., Costa, N., Braga, A.C. (2019). Study of the School Furniture Adequacy to Students’ Anthropometric Dimensions. In: Ahram, T., Karwowski, W., Taiar, R. (eds) Human Systems Engineering and Design. IHSED 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 876. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02053-8_126
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02053-8_126
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