Iran Occupational Health

Background and aims: Nodaways, products have to be used easily and safely. Comfort plays an important role in hand tools and there is a significant relationship between Ergonomic and convenient. Therefore, many hand tool manufacturers implement the fundamentals of Ergonomics in order to produce more convenient instruments. As the screwdriver has been widely used in each society, the goal of this research was to evaluate the screwdriver’s comfort in the Iranian market.

 methods: Three types of screwdrivers currently existed in the Iranian market and were made in Iran, China, and Japan were used by 22 people at the same conditions and based on the standard manner. 12 screws were screwed both horizontally and vertically for all three types separately during the testing procedure. Afterward, the evaluation of Local Posture Discomfort (LPD) was performed.

 Results: While 84.36 % of the Iranian type and 13.64 of the Japanese type are accepted as comfortable tools by the operators, nobody considered the Chinese type as a comfortable tool. The average of discomfort at the yielded LPD test was 2.56, 2.71, and 2.73 for Iranian, Japanese, and Chinese type respectively. These results are related to the description of users from comfort. Based on the Fisher test (p<0.05) there was no significant difference in LPD of screwdrivers.

 Conclusions: According to the tested users, the Iranian Screwdriver with the lower LPD is able to provide more confidence and it is recommended to design this instrument based on more research and Ergonomics criteria.