An organization’s mobile workforce is a vital asset, as it is in the front line liaising with customers, and driving the sale of an organization’s products and/or services. Despite this, the IT support provided to mobile workers is often inferior to that available to office-based workers. Mobile workers operate in an unreliable environment, and as such require differing types of support. Within...

BACKGROUND Low back pain (LBP) is common among office workers and is the most common cause of work-related disability in people under 45 years of age. The aetiology of LBP is widely accepted to be multi-factorial. Prognostic research into office workers at risk of developing LBP has received limited attention. The aims of this study were to develop a risk score to identify office workers likely...

Social geometry is a novel technique for reasoning about the engagement of participants during group meetings on the basis of head orientation data provided by computer vision. This form of group context can be used by ubiquitous environments to route communications between users, or sense availability of users for interruption. We explored problems of distraction by co-workers in office cubicl...

A computer-related health epidemic known as repetitive strain injury (RSI) is rampant in Australia and threatens to overwhelm the workers' compensation system. RSI is a label given to a variety of painful, debilitating conditions believed to be caused by repetitive movements of the hands or arms. In Australia, the latest wave of RSI complaints is centered among female office workers who develop...

Computers have become a primary tool for office workers, allowing them to access the information they need to perform their jobs; however, accessing information is more difficult for more mobile users. With current computer interfaces, the user must focus both physically and mentally on the computing device instead of the environs. In a mobile environment, such interfaces may interfere with the...

Background: Workers in different occupational positions experience significant Cu exposures, however, Cu toxicity has not been fully studied as compared to other heavy metals. In the present study, hematological and hepatic alterations have been investigated among copper mine workers. Materials and Methods: This descriptive study was conducted in a copper mine in west of Iran, on 402 copper mi...

Recently in Japan dioxin problem of municipal solid waste incinerator (MSWI) became social issue. The news spread all around Japan and induced fear that workers at incinerators would suffer from cancer or other serious illness induced by the exposure to dioxins. Authors were interested in the effect of this stressful event occurred to the workers and intended to evaluate mental health status of...

STUDY OBJECTIVE This research examined the impact of daylight exposure on the health of office workers from the perspective of subjective well-being and sleep quality as well as actigraphy measures of light exposure, activity, and sleep-wake patterns. METHODS Participants (N = 49) included 27 workers working in windowless environments and 22 comparable workers in workplaces with significantly...