A study for determining the optimum diameter of chopsticks

Abstract

Chopsticks and knives and forks are fundamental utensils used by Asian and Western-oriented people, respectively, in serving food. Although ergonomics studies on the knife handle have been performed, chopsticks, used by at least 1.5 billion people daily, have seldom been examined by ergonomists. This lack of interest may be attributed to the fact that Occidentals, who tend to give more emphasis on empirical research, do not use chopsticks. Nevertheless, from an ergonomics perspective, chopsticks deserve a systematic study in lieu of the large number of users. This study involves 32 male and female university students who served as the control group. According to these results, the diameter of chopsticks significantly influences `food-pinching' efficiency. Also, the smaller and larger diameters of chopsticks are inferior to those of a medium diameter. In addition, chopsticks with 6 mm diameter are optimum for `food-pinching' efficiency. Subjective preference ranking is also used to cross-validate the above performance measures, with these results confirming the effectiveness of `food-pinching' efficiency measure. Relevance to industry Hand tools considered as extensions of human hands, are very important in industry. Chopsticks are one of the simplest and most convenient and efficient hand tools. The result of this study reveals that both the diameter of chopsticks and different sizes of food heavily influenced the `food-pinching' efficiency. Thus, the designers must consider human factors, and ergonomic aspects of the user–tool interface when designing a new hand tool.