Ergonomic Analysis of a Clothing Design Station

Abstract The conditions of the furniture used to develop school activities are not always ergonomically appropriate, what may lead the students to adopt uncomfortable postures and thus the occurrence of diseases and pains in different parts of their body. Students at different levels of education are not exempt from these situations, since they remain for long periods in classrooms adopting inadequate postural habits, and besides, school furniture may not have the proper conditions to let them adopt correct postures. This research aims to identify ergonomic risks in clothing modeling activities. A descriptive research was performed by case study, in order to verify the adequacy of furniture to the physical type of the students, so that they could carry out their activities without suffering from musculoskeletal pain. In addition, the research was classified as quantitative and qualitative, and the REBA method was applied to assess whether the adopted postures could be the cause of musculoskeletal problems. We used the Nordic questionnaire to establish at what extent the postures were harmful to the health of students. It is noteworthy that 98.2% of the analyzed positions of students are between medium to very high risk, 46.7% have complaints of pain in the hips and thighs, 40.0% in the neck, in the dorsal region, in the lower back and ankles and/or feet, 33.3% in the knees. Equally important is the fact that 8 students (26.7% of the total) have complained in the past seven days about pain in the lower back and hips and/or thighs; 23.3% in the knees and 20.0% in the dorsal region and ankles and/or feet. It can be concluded that the school environment can lead to the adoption of bad postures due to both the disagreement of furniture to students’ anthropometric measures and to inadequate postural habits.