Professional Ergonomist Research Articles

Current certification criteria and future image of certified professional ergonomist in comparison with the IEA version of "Core Competencies in Human Factors and Ergonomics Ergonomics"

Current certification criteria and future image of certified professional ergonomist in comparison with the IEA version of "Core Competencies in Human Factors and Ergonomics Ergonomics"

S1E3-5 Necessity and future objectives of the Certified Professional Ergonomist - Role of in-house design ergonomist -

S1E3-5 Necessity and future objectives of the Certified Professional Ergonomist - Role of in-house design ergonomist -

S1E3-1 Position and direction of Certified Professional Ergonomist -Vision and policy-

S1E3-1 Position and direction of Certified Professional Ergonomist -Vision and policy-

Human Factors Consulting: The Ins & Outs, Ups & Downs, Pros & Cons

The objective of this panel is to provide attendees with the opportunity to learn about what they always wanted to know about the wide world of human factors consulting, but were afraid to ask (or didn’t know to ask). This session should be of interest to meeting attendees at any stage of their career, including students and those who might be considering a career change or branching out. These panelists, together, have experience over a wide range of consulting domains, as well as being individuals who are at different stages in their consulting careers. As such, the panel session will provide attendees with multiple perspectives on select topics and on responses to attendees’ questions. Sheree Gibson, PE, CPE is President of Ergonomic Applications, a small industrial ergonomics consulting firm in South Carolina. She has been a consultant for most of her professional life, working for a forensic consulting firm as well as an in-house ergonomics consultant for Michelin Tire before setting out on her own. She has a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and a M.S.E. in Applied Ergonomics, both from West Virginia University. She is active in the American Industrial Hygiene Association, the American Society of Safety Engineers and HFES. Sheree is also Vice-President of the Foundation for Professional Ergonomics. Richard Kelly, PhD earned his doctorate in Engineering Psychology from New Mexico State University and went on to work as an engineering psychologist for the Army at White Sands and then for the Navy at SPAWAR in San Diego. After about 10 years supporting large and small RDT&E programs and leading teams of scientists and engineers, he left the government to start Pacific Science & Engineering (PSE). Over the past 34 years, PSE has grown steadily from 2 to 50 employees and has been a prime contractor, subcontractor, and consultant on hundreds of projects in many different domains, including military, intelligence, industrial process, commercial, medical, education, autonomous vehicles, and more. PSE remains an independent, employee-owned company entirely focused on human performance in complex systems. The technical staff have received numerous recognitions from clients and professional groups for their outstanding work that makes a real difference for our users. Dee Miller, PhD works at Dell, Inc. in the Business Transformation Office as the Senior Principal UX & Service Design Engineer building relationships and appropriately influencing relevant internal teams and direct business contacts in the adoption of a human-centered approach to designing internal systems and processes and delivering services related to Order Experience Life Cycle. She recently started an independent consultancy called Dawn Specialty Consulting. One of the first projects of the new consultancy is consulting with a local non-profit and a police department on applying design thinking to community policing initiatives. Dee has prior experience consulting with state and federal government agencies on matters pertaining to transportation and healthcare. Tom Albin, PE, CPE, PhD is a licensed professional engineer and a certified professional ergonomist. He holds a PhD from the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands. Currently the principal of High Plains Ergonomics Service, Tom has been engaged in ergonomics consulting since 2001. He has extensive experience as a researcher, a corporate ergonomist and as a product developer. He is active in the US and International Standards community, chairing the ANSI/HFES 100 computer workstation standard and serving as an accredited US expert on several ISO committees. He was Executive Director of the Office Ergonomics Research Committee from 2007 until retiring in 2018. Tom’s consulting work has been principally concerned with physical ergonomics issues in office and industrial settings. Current projects deal with evaluation of injury risk during push and pull tasks and with applied anthropometry. Topics Panelists will each be given time to introduce themselves at the beginning of the session. Each will speak for 7-10 minutes about their career path, ‘what I like best about consulting’, and ‘3-5 things I wish I had known before I started consulting’. The panel will also address the following topics: ethics, running a business (business plans, financing, insurance, legalities, managing employees, marketing, building relationships with clients, and writing contracts), and work/life balance. These topics will be introduced, in the form of questions from the moderator if/when questions from the audience are exhausted.

S8-4 Present state of certification system for professional ergonomist in Asian region

S8-4 Present state of certification system for professional ergonomist in Asian region

S8-1 Activity of Certified Professional Ergonomist

S8-1 Activity of Certified Professional Ergonomist

UI Form design considerations for ergonomists evaluating computer workstations

A professional ergonomist performing a workplace evaluation identifies risk factors and provides recommendations to mitigate these risks. This system involves analysis of the interaction between a human subject and the subject’s computer based work environment. Since the data required to be collected is more than the average person can keep in their short term memory, it is safe to say the ergonomist will need to record observations. This will have to be done while simultaneously interacting with the employee performing work. Human-computer interaction is observed by the ergonomist, but ergonomists themselves also use a computer or tablet to take records and produce a report. The interaction and interface of the data collection form for ergonomic evaluations should cater to the needs and capabilities of the ergonomist in the field (Kim, 2015) and so it is not a surprise that most forms are designed by the ergonomists themselves. These forms are also typically tailored to the type of task being evaluated (i.e. computer, laboratory, industrial) because each of their environments have particular equipment or tools these need to be recorded. For example, a computer workstation will include a chair, desk, displays, etc. while a lap will have a stool chair, bench height seating, rack, flow hood, etc. This paper will describe key user-interface form design considerations for office ergonomic evaluation forms with the purpose of optimizing the user-experience for an ergonomic professional. Applications include the use of a form on a laptop computer, tablet, or phone in a computer workstation environment. This paper will consider factors related to the working environment, reliability, input requirements, form structure and flow, and front end to back end management agents. The goal of any interface is to be intuitive enough that it would require minimal familiarization to be reliably implemented (Norman, 2002). As users gain familiarity with the form entries, the ergonomist can benefit from increased speed, accuracy and consistency of their evaluations. The report generated by these completed forms can be utilized in legal and workers compensation cases and therefore they require special consideration in the way the questions are phrased and ordered to reduce potential for error and opportunities to place blame. This added complexity makes their design more than a simple task. Guidelines are included in this article that will proactively assist ergonomists in designing effective forms.

KD1-4 Challenges in Establishing the Professional Ergonomist Certification Scheme in Malaysia

The certified professional ergonomist scheme is a requirement for any country that wishes to recognize the field of ergonomics as a professional service rendered by qualified and competent persons for the benefit of the public. Various countries like USA, Europe, Australia and New Zealand have already established the professional ergonomist scheme in their countries. However the recognition for the need to have a professional ergonomist certification scheme is slowly being brought forth in developing countries such as Malaysia, where the field of ergonomics is relatively unknown to the Malaysian public. However, since the field of ergonomics have become more popular in Malaysia, the need to have a Malaysian professional ergonomist certification scheme became quite important. Developing a professional ergonomist certification scheme in Malaysia is not without any challenges. Some of the notable challenges are the absence of any clearly stated standards or regulation within legal framework which requires ergonomics competency, establishing educational standards which are culturally relevant to Malaysia, establishing the route of certification which suites Malaysia context due to diversity of experience, exposure to ergonomics intervention and other programs and operational challenges in setting up Malaysian ergonomist certification framework. All these challenges are described in this paper.

2S2-2 人間工学専門家の役割と実践

2S2-2 人間工学専門家の役割と実践

2S2-5 製造業のモノづくりにおける人間工学専門家の役割

2S2-5 製造業のモノづくりにおける人間工学専門家の役割

2S2-6 海外の人間工学専門家認定機構との連携状況

2S2-6 海外の人間工学専門家認定機構との連携状況

1S3-3 人間工学の専門家としての使命と活動について

1S3-3 人間工学の専門家としての使命と活動について

人間工学グッドプラクティスデータベース(GPDB)と人間工学専門家

人間工学グッドプラクティスデータベース(GPDB)と人間工学専門家

Certification of Professional Ergonomists

The expansion of interest in ergonomics worldwide, as evidenced by growth in the number of federated societies affiliated with the International Ergonomics Association (IEA), has been accompanied by growing awareness of the need for quality assurance regarding the training and credentials of professional ergonomists. Responsibility for such quality assurance often is assumed by professional ergonomist certifying bodies. This article addresses (a) the current status of professional ergonomist certification programs from an international perspective, as promulgated in a number of countries, and (b) the experience of selected certification programs with the IEA certifying body accreditation process.

International background for inevitable introduction of professional ergonomist

International background for inevitable introduction of professional ergonomist

専門職創出を必要とする国際的背景

専門職創出を必要とする国際的背景

Paper 4: The Skills of the Driver and the Response of the Vehicle

There appears to be increasing acknowledgement of the importance of ergonomics in automobile design but only at the superficial level of seat comfort, panel design, and control positions. This is not to say that these aspects are not important, a reasonable level of research of this kind obviously deserves support but there is, as yet, almost no appreciation of the kind of problems which a professional ergonomist would like to study, given the opportunity and the resources. Ergonomics is systems design with the characteristics of the human operator as the frame of reference. Automobiles are not ends in themselves, they should be designed to conform to the requirements, abilities, and limitations of the people who are the sole justification for their existence. This includes passengers, drivers, maintenance engineers, pedestrians, and producers. The passenger problems can be summarized under that useful, if indefinable term, ‘comfort’. This is a question of seat and space design which sounds straightforward but in detail it becomes quite complex. The properties of seats cannot be determined in isolation from those of suspension systems and road surfaces. Although there has been a good deal of work in the last decade on vibration most of it is on the basis of sinusoidal inputs from which any extrapolation to real conditions of wide power density spectra is dubious. Noise levels and heating systems are probably understood to the point where the design compromises are made on a cost basis. The driver has all the passengers' problems plus those of the handling characteristics of the vehicle. Little is known scientifically about the relative importance of inputs of information through the windows, from the instruments, through the control linkages, and from the various modes of acceleration of the head. The dynamics of steering systems is another potentially fruitful area when related to human performance.