THE IMPLEMENTATION OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING BASED MODEL FOR MITIGATING REPETITIVE STRAIN INJURY (RSI) AMONG COMPUTER USERS

Abstract

Repetitive Stress Injury (RSI) is a fall-out from continuous and persistent computer usage over an extended period of time.Several research works on RSI were geared toward detective approaches in identifying factors relating to or inducing RSI within the work-place and other work related areas. Studies have also shown that short breaks have a protective effect over the development of RSI. It has been shown that ergonomic break/exercise promoted by inbuilt computer software very significantly reduces the incidence of repetitive strain injury. The limitation associated with previous research work includes prompting the computer user to take a break after a threshold time period has been exceeded but does not enforce this break. Also previous research never took into consideration idle time when initiating their threshold time frame.In an earlier work we designed and proposed RSI model capable of enacting involuntarily force break after a pre-determined time frame of 60 minutes. Implementation of the proposed Software Engineering RSI Model base on Java Version 6.0 that forces the computer users to take a break after 60 minutes of active system activities taking into consideration idle time by initiating involuntarily force–shutdown is the objective of this research paper. Forty computer users were allowed to use the system for a period for two months. A post implementation survey carried out shows a significant reduction in the RSI symptoms among computer users.