Iran Occupational Health

  Background and aims : In our daily lives hand tools are often used in many work situations. With respect to design characteristics, hand tools can be considered a risk factor when a high level of repetition are required or when awkward postures are adopted. Therefore attention to ergonomics design rules for hand tools is the most important factor in design process. With this in mind, the aim of the present study is to evaluate a new model of home stripper which designed based on ergonomics rules.

  Methods : Ten healthy female subjects participate in this study. Seven tests were considered for each subject. The subject was instructed to strip a cucumber using six commercial models as well as with a new model , separately . The surface electromyography (EMG) signals were recorded from three muscles: biceps brachii, triceps brachii, and flexor digitorum. To make possible the comparison between models in all experiments varied between the subjects, the raw EMG signals was normalized.

  Results : For biceps brachii muscle, the analysis of variance revealed that there was no significant difference on the mean EMG data among all models, however muscular activity for the new model of stripper was found lower than the other models. The results indicated that the changes among the mean EMG data of models for triceps brachii, and flexor digitorum muscle were found significant. Tukey tests shows that differences between the EMG data for the new model with one commercial model were significant.

  Conclusion : A new model with commercial models of stripper was tested to evaluate the effects of design characteristics on EMG signals. The results of this study show that muscular activity is mostly related to specific design of hand tools considering form, shape and product design aspects.