Environmental Ergonomics

Environmental Ergonomics addresses the problems of maintaining human comfort, activity and health in stressful environments. Its subject areas include thermal environments, illumination, noise and hypo- and hyperbaric environments. The book concentrates fundamentally on the way the thermal environment has affected human comfort, health and performance from the age of cave-dwellings to our age of skyscrapers. This book contains only papers selected from the 10th ICEE held in Japan 23-27 September 2002. The ICEE has been held biannually since 1982, and has firmly established itself as the world’s most distinguished conference in its field, offering the ideal forum for research scientists, medical doctors, engineers, administrators, technicians, healthcare professionals and students to share their work and ideas. Selected papers from the 10th International Conference on Environmental Ergonomics held in Japan, 23-27 September 2002. They have been revised and peer-reviewed. Papers included in this text have been widely recognised as the catalyst for the recent advances witnessed in Environmental Ergonomics in Asia. They strike a balance between academia and industries' views on environmental ergonomics. Add this volume to your copy of the Elsevier Ergonomics Book Series.

Until quite recently conditions in industry were often rough. Long hours were worked in insanitary and murky workshops, often with little regard to the effects upon the workpeople who were considered to be expendable. Now, however, these adverse conditions have been recognized and so remedied that there remains little in industrial conditions to disturb the public conscience. This does not mean that conditions of work in office or factory are perfect. The obvious and dramatic abuses of the human frame may have gone, but in their place have arisen stresses and strains which, taking effect only in the long term, are generally undramatic and often unrecognized. They exist none the less. No organized effort to study the effect of working conditions on man's performance was made until the end of World War I, when the Industrial Fatigue Research Board was set up. For the first time, men trained in the human sciences entered industry to study men at work. They made con tributions which set a new standard of scientific investigation into human performance and allowed executive action on the basis of evidence rather than of hunch. The Board's work differed from the contribution of Gilbreth in America in that the principles of Motion Study which he developed were, to a large extent, based on intelligent observation rather than controlled experiment. During the 1920S the National Institute of Industrial Psychology was founded and there was close collaboration between it and the I.F.R.B.

This book focuses on different sustainable products and services, such as electrical vehicles, green buildings, and biophilic and biomimetic systems, at multiple hierarchical levels within its chapters. The authors reflect on individual, organisational, governmental, political, and moral considerations of how Human Factor Ergonomics can build a sustainable future. This book is a must-read for anyone concerned with environmental issues and sustainability.

Production ergonomics – the science and practice of designing industrial workplaces to optimize human well-being and system performance – is a complex challenge for a designer. Humans are a valuable and flexible resource in any system of creation, and as long as they stay healthy, alert and motivated, they perform well and also become more competent over time, which increases their value as a resource. However, if a system designer is not mindful or aware of the many threats to health and system performance that may emerge, the end result may include inefficiency, productivity losses, low working morale, injuries and sick-leave. To help budding system designers and production engineers tackle these design challenges holistically, this book offers a multi-faceted orientation in the prerequisites for healthy and effective human work. We will cover physical, cognitive and organizational aspects of ergonomics, and provide both the individual human perspective and that of groups and populations, ending up with a look at global challenges that require workplaces to become more socially and economically sustainable. This book is written to give you a warm welcome to the subject, and to provide a solid foundation for improving industrial workplaces to attract and retain healthy and productive staff in the long run.

The first encyclopedia in the field, the International Encyclopedia of Ergonomics and Human Factors provides a comprehensive and authoritative compendium of current knowledge on ergonomics and human factors. It gives specific information on concepts and tools unique to ergonomics. About 500 entries, published in three volumes and on CD-ROM, are pre