Ergonomics Books

Good instruction, a great price, and a growing-in-importance subject area all add up to a definite recommendation.

As a college student who spends hours and hours in front of a computer working on my thesis, this book has transformed the way I work. No longer do I suffer from back pain, sore wrists, and neck strain. Beautifully written, concise, and practical,"Ergaerobics" is truly a "must have" book for everyone! Every college campus should provide it for their students!

"Why does working @ my computer hurt so much" is the best book I've found on preventing repetitive stress injuries. It filled with practical information for anyone who spends long hours in front of a computer (secretaries, programmers, writers, college students).

The authors, both physical therapists, provide guidelines for arranging your workstation and how to sit there once it's arranged. The best part is an extensive list of exercises for your back,neck,jaw,thumbs,wrists,elbows, and shoulders designed specifically to prevent repetitive stress injuries. In addition, each exercise is illustrated so you never have to wonder if your doing the exercises correctly.

Once again, a great book!

As a college student who spends hours and hours in front of a computer working on my thesis, this book has transformed the way I work. No longer do I suffer from back pain, sore wrists, and neck strain. Beautifully written, concise, and practical,"Ergaerobics" is truly a "must have" book for everyone! Every college campus should provide it for their students!

ErgAerobics is a comprehensive guide to help computer users avoid "Computer Induced Repetitive Stress Injuries." In an easily understandable, entertaining, and concise manner ErgAerobics provides basic human anatomy information that anyone can understand as well as facts about Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, Lower Back Pain, Neck Pain, TMJ Disorder, Tennis Elbow, Shoulder Impingement Syndrome, Thoracic Outlet Syndrome, and DeQuervain's Disease. ErgAerobics offers tips on how to prevent and treat computer induced repetitive stress injuries, how to properly arrange a workstation, behavior modification techniques to help the reader interact with a computer in a safer, more cooperative manner. ErgAerobics is enhanced with simple, inconspicuous, effective exercises to help with the prevention and treatment of computer induced repetitive stress injuries including why, when, and how to exercise. If you spend days working at a computer - read ErgAerobics.

Excellent book. Well writen yet simple and easy to comprehend. Now all I have to do is get into a reg scedule.

The information in this book is helpful and worth reading, but could be condensed from 100 pages to about 30 because of the repeated messages throughout the book. For example, the advice of doing a standing back bend after sitting for a period of time must have been written 10 different times.
I believe that one of the biggest benefits of reading ANY book for back pain is that it makes you start to think more about your back and how to care for it throughout the day. So this book serves as a source for some good stretches as well as being a conscious reminder to focus on back health.

I love this book! It helped ease my back pain. The exercises were easy to follow. I reccomend it to everyone with back pain.

Not only did I learn why I have back pain but also how to treat it. My range of motion has increased dramatically and my back pain is gone!! It's an easy read with uncomplicated exercises. A must for those with chronic back pain.

Being a Physical Therapist I have found this to be a great book to give to my patients. It is easy to understand and very informative. The author uses characters to represent different aspects of the spine. This makes it a fun book to read for all. This book educates the person on posture and how to protect their spine as well as help reduce existing back pain. I highly recommend this book.

Easy transaction, book in condition it was described and received it on time...would buy from seller again.

When someone reviews statistical information about human factors in air accidents, it is very easy to find that under the label "human factors" there are many different and heterogeneous things.

The real way to know what is the importance of human factors is an in-depth analysis of many accidents without accepting the generic "human factors" as an explanation. That is exactly what authors make with several accidents explaining beyond NTSB analysis why crew behaved in a way that, finally, drove to an accident.

The book shows a model of analysis and that is very useful for investigators or air safety experts in general. However, the application of that kind of analysis to many other accidents -all of them, if possible, instead of a few ones- should be extremely useful not only to avoid new accidents but to design new planes, new SOPs and new training models.

The conclusion we could extract is as follows: At this moment, we are not extracting all the possible knowledge from an accident. The book explains how to go further.

It reads like a thesis but is full of great analyses beyond the "official" accident reports. Most aircraft accidents are attributed to "pilot error." Here, the authors dissect the human factors in several accidents and delve into human fallibilities and technical traps which make us all prone to error.

The authors have applied insights from cognitive psychology to nineteen flight-crew-related accidents. In place of the dry narratives of accident reports, we are presented with compelling three-dimensional accounts in which pilots are routinely faced with time pressure, the need to make judgments under uncertainty, and rare but potentially lethal system failures. In examining each accident, the authors attempt to reconstruct the mindset of the pilots, and place the actions of the crew in the context of the flow of events. In contrast to other reviews of accidents, the authors avoid the phrase "the pilots should have...". Instead we are gently encouraged to understand how skilled and professional operators can come to make mistakes in circumstances that are unforgiving of error.

Through the lens of cognitive psychology, the aviation industry becomes a massive human performance laboratory, in which hapless operators are faced with situations and problems produced not by experimenters, but by the complexities of the system of which they are a part. The authors take pains to counter the common presumption that catastrophic accidents must somehow result from extreme acts of villainy or incompetence. In this book, we repeatedly see how accidents often arise from combinations of everyday problems and situations.

By the end of the book, some fascinating patterns begin to emerge. A surprising number of the accidents involved apparently simple slips and lapses. Additionally, the majority of accidents occurred on approach and landing, and most of the accident flights were running late. The failure to go-around from an un-stabilized approach is a common theme in the accident scenarios.

On a minor note, a few more illustrations and diagrams would have added some variety to the text, and more extensive quotations from cockpit voice recordings may have helped. Overall however, the book provides a useful compendium of case studies that will be of value to industry and academia. Airline training personnel in particular will find much that is useful in this book.

Out of approximately 10 million air carrier flights annually in the US, only about 50 involve a major accident. That may not sound like much, but those accidents consist of events like these: a Continental Airlines flight that landed without its landing gear deployed in Houston; an American Airlines flight that suffered loss of control at 16000 ft.; and another American Airlines flight that hit some trees while attempting to land, the culmination of a series of small, individually insignificant errors. These are some of the examples scrutinized in detail, drawn from a large population of accidents in which human error was a major factor. This book makes fascinating reading - providing pilots and aviation professionals with a new perspective on crew error, and the general public with a new way of looking at the whole aviation system and how safety issues are considered.

The authors dissect these accidents in a way that the airline industry has not attempted in great depth before. Rather than stopping at the facts and a conclusion of "crew error", they ask why highly skilled flight crews, with thousands of hours of flying experience, make mistakes and erroneous judgments with horrifying consequences. The common reaction after an accident is that the crew was not sufficiently skilled, otherwise they would not have made the error. The authors start with a different assumption: they assume that the crew was as good as any other crew that could have been chosen, and from that starting point, their illuminating analyses lead them to consider some very interesting psychological and operational factors that underlie these accidents.

To do this, the authors draw on their expertise on how the human brain works (memory systems and decision-making apparatus) and their complementary expertise on aviation and operations. The authors are all affiliated with NASA; two of the them are research psychologists, one of them was a major investigator with the primary transportation investigative arm of the government, the National Transportation & Safety Board, and all of them have extensive experience with aviation safety.

The book covers 19 accidents, devoting a chapter to each. Two additional chapters at the end provide statistics and a summary of the common themes and factors the authors uncover as contributing to these accidents, along with some prescription of possible countermeasures. When an airplane is involved in an accident, the National Transportation & Safety Board performs thorough investigations - these include interviews with the survivors, forensic evidence, the data from the black box, etc. The investigators produce a report that lays out the facts and their judgment of the causes of the accident.

The studies in this book take these reports as a starting point, and go down paths that the NTSB never ventures (their charter does not permit that). Each of the accident chapters is constructed to provide first a factual recount of the event and the NTSB conclusions. From here the authors identify the most significant events leading up to the accident, and for each event in turn, provide an analysis that mixes operational knowledge with cognitive functioning.

This is not a Michael Crichton thriller, but those familiar with aviation will easily be able to follow the details as they are stated in factual, non-judgmental manner, and will see into the deep causes of the events that led up to the final accident. Readers who are already familiar with aviation terminology will find the book easy to read (do you know what "LOFT" and "windshear" mean?). At the end, the very helpful glossary covers both aviation and cognitive psychology terms so that readers of all levels of industry expertise or interest can enjoy this useful study.

hhfg

I re-read this book again this year (2002) after a decade of its first publication in 1988, it still looks amazingly current, especially consider internet's wide adoption since 1995.

It was as though the smart machines and their relationships with human workplace has not changed since 1988. Even in silicon valley where I work, with so many tech companies with managers trained in technology background, their orgazniations keeps failing by repeating the single-minded strategy - replace human with technology.

As long as corporate America keep ignoring the main advice of t this book - that to fully utilize technology you have to understand the non-technical aspects of it (historical, psychological, social) - real productivity gain might be limited, until maybe we move everything to Bangalore, India.

I first read this book back in 1989 when I was working for NeXT computer, and it has remained in my mind as a landmark book. I heard a presentation from a person from Allegeny college that referenced this book. He was discussing the fact that when people are given different tools they solve problems in different ways. If all you have is DOS you abiltiy to solve information problems will be based on what you can do with DOS. But if you had a NeXT... Since reading this book I have tried to apply these concepts to my teaching object-oriented programming and high reuse problem solving techniques. This book really helped me understand that using advanced computers is a lot more then just teaching people a different windowing system. It is about getting them to rethink they WAY they solve thier problems using the cognative styles enabled by advanced software systems. Tim Berners-Lee could never have drempt of the web from a DOS system. But from a NeXT...

Zuboff's book should have been titled "The Future of Work and Power in the Age of the Smart Machine," because while the book does speak to the increasing computerization of the workplace, it does so in an historical context regarding how power has been and might be distributed between worker and manager. Automation is the effort to remove human skill from work, making humans the servants of the "smart machine." Informating is the way in which the computer can potentially change the workplace by distributing "management information" and power to the workers, making them co-equal partners in the enterprise. Zuboff suggests we still have a choice about which way to go, despite our self-protective impulses

I use this text in a course called "Work and Community" because it shows how various disciplines--history, philosophy, sociology, cognitive psychology --can inform discussions about how work is organized, and the kinds of power or authority relationships that workplaces, especially those where computers have changed the nature of work, abound. What's particularly interesting for me is the way Zuboff hits on the sort of literacy encouraged by computerized workplaces, and how information sharing requires real re-thinking of traditional roles of managers. In addition, the historical treatment of management as a developing professional competence would be critically enlightening for those who tend to study "business" as if it were merely a skill to acquire, rather than something with a history to be understood.

This valuable book is loaded with imformation to help with work station and tool design, human anthropometrics, and much more. I highly recommend this book.

I picked up a copy of the first edition of this book while working on my master's degree in ergonmics. I found it to be a useful quick reference. Once working as an ergonomist it proved to be a valuable tool. It is small enough to be easy to carry along when going out to work sites. The various illustrations are simple and clear; handy when explaining a concept. I've recommended it to workers, managers and supervisors who wanted a low-cost reference. It is a tool they can use after I'm gone to answer basic questions. In short, if you want one book about ergonomics and are concerned about cost then this one would be an excellent choice.

great book for beginners! lots of wonderful simple to understand images and captions follow. very informative about the requirements of ergonomics in the design field and how it affects products. cheap enough to buy and keep for reference on your own bookshelf - very handy!

a new field - or major branch - of Architecture is now upon us. As Senior Advisor for Arificial Intelligence, i recommend quickscan of this matter. Graphs & color pgs help speed input, comprehenshun. Recommend translation to video, etc. Read w hiliter & make notes freely...Do it in team-read fashion.

a new field - or major branch - of Architecture is now upon us. As Senior Advisor for Arificial Intelligence, i recommend quickscan of this matter. Graphs & color pgs help speed input, comprehenshun. Recommend translation to video, etc. Read w hiliter & make notes freely...Do it in team-read fashion.

Explores the design of the physical workplace and the role this factor plays in improving productivity and operational effectiveness. Based on a four-year research project conducted by the MIT School of Architecture and Planning's Space Planning and Organization Research Group, this book introduces the concept of Process Architecture, meaning engaging a wide array of stakeholders in rethinking the dynamic relationship between work processes and the spatial, technological, financial, and organizational environments with which these processes occur. The authors provide a comprehensive explanation of the approach and framework with cases from the field. For those concerned with organizational strategy and design, this work introduces a key aspect-the workplace-often overlooked in organization change initiatives. This is an thoughtful book with original thinking. Highly recommended. Reviewed by Gerry Stern and Yvette Borcia, founders, Stern & Associates and HR Knowledge Network, authors of Stern's Sourcefinder: The Master Directory to HR and Business Management Information & Resources, Stern's CyberSpace SourceFinder, and Stern's Compensation and Benefits.

"Handbook of Human Factors and Ergonomics" is an excellent seminal work on human factors and ergonomics. It is a well researched and well written book on the subject, well illustrated with case studies, examples, tables and figures.

The book has a comprehensive coverage of the subject and covers a wide range of subjects and applications which makes it an indispensable part of the library for human factor and ergonomics practitioners, safety managers and auditors, engineers and other specialists. This weighty tome is worth the price and should not intimidate the reader.

A definate must for the Ergo student! The book has excellent describtive definitions and is an eye opener to the world of work. It focus on a diffirent perspective on the qaulity of worklife.

Pardon the cliche but if you're only going to buy one 'hand' book (it's more like a phone book), this is the one you should get. It covers conventional physical ergonomics, as well as every other significant genre in the field.
When I'm stuck for a quality resource, I find what I need here. Ouch! I'm still paying for it though.

This is a unique book on human factors in multi-crew flight operations. I come from a region where a significant number of middle aged pilots leave airlines for greener pastures elsewhere leaving a lot of young first officers flying with relatively elderly captains. Also the culture in many countries tends to be hierarchical and worship seniority (the Captain is God syndrome). This book provides valuable lessons on how to enhance communication, deal with cultural issues, and highlight human limitations and errors, the operating environment, among several other critical subjects.

The subject is treated very well in a reader-friendly manner. The importance of CRM is highlighted and the need to work as a team. Since most airplane accidents worldwide are as a result of human factors, the importance of this subject to pilots cannot be underestimated. Hence this is a useful and handy book to read and refer to often and keep on your bookshelf as a ready reference manual.

"HUMAN FACTORS IN MULTI-CREW FLIGHT OPERATIONS" co-written by Harry and Linda Orlady - Ashgate ISBN 0-291-39839-1 - Published in 1999

A father and daughter team! It is rare enough to have a flying father and a flying daughter in the real world, but sharing the same passion so intensely and to write a book together on an all-encompassing aviation Bible, (yes, this book is a Bible for aviators!) is truly unprecedented!

When I said this book covers virtually all topics concerning flight operations related topics, I meant just that. The most important thing is; this book is highly readable, rich in reference materials and data and yet "gripping" to read! A rare gem in terms of human factor topics. I have read other CRM or human factors books by other more renowned and authoritative people but none as good as the Orladys, probably with the exception of Tony Kern, who is also just as good a writer on aviation safety.

Okay, the book covers the brief history of air transport, the industry and its safety record,, a brief history of human factor and its development in aviation,, the physical environment and the physiology of flight, as well as those magnificent flying machines and their internal environment - sort of like a trip down to aviation memory lane.

It also discussed the social environment, basic communication, documentation - including checklists and information management. It went on to discuss on the Man's limitations, human errors, and information processing. Nothing is left unturned, the Orladys went on to talk about workload, automation, situation awareness and operating in today's environment. Of course, they did not miss out on crew resource management and the team approach.

Fatigue and stress were covered in depth, plus fitness to fly, even selection and training of pilots! Most interestingly is the coverage on the challenging roles of the flight attendants, this shift in focus of our cabin colleagues was most insightful.

I loved the chapter on non-punitive incident reporting.. the CHIRP and ASRS were great success stories in UK and USA respectively, I fervently hope that SIA will follow suit in our pursuit of excellence in aviation flight safety.

Another eye-opener chapter is "some ramifications of accident analysis", this is the first time I heard of the "Stop Rule" phenomenon in flight safety investigation - find it out yourself what it means.

In the last few chapters, the Orladys talked about the worldwide safety challenge in the near future, the current safety problems and the future of air transport too.

This is not a book to be missed by any pilot who wish to enrich himself, you may get this book from AMAZON dot com. Hardcover costs US$109.95! and papaerback costs US$44.95!

Credits:

Capt Harry W Orlady was a B747 captain for United Airlines, he has contributed a lot in the CRM research works with NASA's AMES Research Centre in California.

Linda M Orlady, a GA instructor pilot and an expert in organizational behaviour.

Eddie Foo

A father and daughter team! It is rare enough to have a flying father and a flying daughter in the real world, but sharing the same passion so intensely and to write a book together on an all-encompassing aviation Bible, (yes, this book is a Bible for aviators!) is truly unprecedented!

When I said this book covers virtually all topics concerning flight operations, I meant just that. The most important thing is; this book is highly readable, rich in reference materials and data and yet "gripping" to read! A rare gem in terms of human factor topics. I have read other CRM or human factors books by other more renowned and authoritative people but none as good as the Orladys, probably with the exception of Tony Kern, who is also just as good a writer on aviation safety.

Okay, the book covers the brief history of air transport, the industry and its safety record,, a brief history of human factor and its development in aviation,, the physical environment and the physiology of flight, as well as those magnificent flying machines and their internal environment - sort of like a trip down to aviation memory lane.

It also discussed the social environment, basic communication, documentation - including checklists and information management. It went on to discuss on the Man's limitations, human errors, and information processing. Nothing is left unturned, the Orladys went on to talk about workload, automation, situation awareness and operating in today's environment. Of course, they did not miss out on crew resource management and the team approach.

Fatigue and stress were covered in depth, plus fitness to fly, even selection and training of pilots! Most interestingly is the coverage on the challenging roles of the flight attendants, this shift in focus of our cabin colleagues was most insightful.

I loved the chapter on non-punitive incident reporting.. the CHIRP and ASRS were great success stories in UK and USA respectively, I fervently hope that SIA will follow suit in our pursuit of excellence in aviation flight safety.

Another eye-opener chapter is "some ramifications of accident analysis", this is the first time I heard of the "Stop Rule" phenomenon in flight safety investigation - find it out yourself what it means.

In the last few chapters, the Orladys talked about the worldwide safety challenge in the near future, the current safety problems and the future of air transport too.

This is not a book to be missed by any pilot who wish to enrich himself. In fact, I recommend that every single commercial pilot should own a copy for reference purposes as well.

The correspondence between this work and that of Alan Cooper (The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity and About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design) are staggering. Dr. Endsley and her co-writers rail about how a technology focus leads to poor user interfaces, and recommend a user-centered design approach including "Goal-directed Task Analysis." Alan Cooper rails about how a technology focus leads to poor user interfaces and recommends a user-focused approach he calls "Goal-Directed Design." The difference between this book and Cooper's books is the wealth of dramatic examples and underlying research in Designing for Situation Awareness.

Situation Awareness refers to the OO of the OODA loop - getting input from the environment - Observing - and understanding the significance of that input now and in the future - Orienting. It is a concept used widely in aviation, medicine, and the military - areas where life and death decisions are routinely made based on situation awareness.

One study cited in this book identifies flawed situation awareness as the root cause of 88% of aircraft crashes due to human error. In the remaining 12% the wrong decision was made or there was a problem with execution. With these sobering figures, this book lays out design guidelines to enhance situation awareness.

A formal situation awareness design approach would involve realistic prototyping and rigorous testing as you'd expect for anything related to aviation or medicine. This book provides 50 concrete design principles in six different areas to assist this formal design cycle, but as the book says: "These principles can be applied to a wide range of systems from a variety of domains where achieving and maintaining SA [Situation Awareness] is challenging."

Anyone designing interfaces to support situation awareness or quick comprehension - like performance dashboards - can learn from this book. Unlike software design examples, the examples in this book contain flight numbers and phrases like "killing all aboard" that underscore how very critical situation awareness is, and how driven the authors are to help raise the standards of design.

The only minor criticism I can level is a feeling that this book was rushed together; but with the critical importance of the topic I can see why. I look forward to the recently announced second edition.

This is a Should Read for anyone involved with the design of information technology to support complex problem-solving and decision-making in any setting. It's a Must Read for anyone working with highly dynamic situations or critical situation management, including emergency and disaster response. Dr. Endsley and her co-authors not only lay out a very thorough explanation of the design challenges imposed by human cognitive behaviors and limitations, but also review in depth the research that reveals these behaviors and limitations. They then present a very comprehensive set of guidelines for addressing these challenges in design.

Chapter 4 should be required reading for all user interface design practitioners and students. In this chapter, Dr. Endsley (who comes from the human factors and ergonomics field) and her colleagues lay out a much better description of the process of designing and developing user interface software than any I have seen anywhere in the human-computer interaction or software engineering literature.

This book is the result of years of exhaustive research that sets a gold standard for use-inspired basic research. It is useful to researchers as well as practitioners. I am in awe of the quality of the work and the quality of the results.

I'm researching systems-development related topics at the moment and this book is one of the few I've encountered that gives an abundant amount of carefully considered information. Most books, it seems, can be summarized in a sentence or two. Dillon's work, on the other hand, is one of the most detailed--and purposeful--I've seen. I'd recommend this book not only to text designers but anyone interested in user-centered design. Its implications for users (who are often scanners, not readers!) are broad and significant, encompassing motivations (why people read, or why they visit websites and what they expect to get out of their experience) and navigation and wayfinding issues. Another useful component of the book is its discussion of using models and frameworks as a tool to faciliate structured research and development. Many thanks to Dillon for providing a first rate book on a pervasive, yet largely ignored topic. I look forward to seeing more of his work in the future.

This is by far the best analysis of reading of electronic text that I have seen. He provides an excellent insight as to what is, what might be, and what is not important for on-screen reading.

He does not limit text to just fiction/non-fiction categories, but instead discusses: WHY it is read professional/personal reasons, to learn or not, out of interest/need, etc. WHAT type of information it contains technical or non-technical, subject matter, general or specific, textual or graphic, etc. HOW it is read serially or non-serially, once or repeatedly, browsed or studied in depth, etc.

His book suggests to me that text should alter its format to the meet the users - Why, What, and How. Possible examples: switch to all caps when searching for words or phrases, turn off hyperlink indicators for linear reading, ...

He points out that there have been many studies on editing text, but few on reading text. A good fraction of the book deals with on-screen reading.

Screen reading was better with: high resolution characters, increased space between lines (leading), proportional font, limiting the number of characters on a line, and not splitting a sentence across a page boundary.

He indicates that users preferred on-screen reading over paper reading for some tasks when the screens had enough improvements.

Screen reading might be improved with: landmarks/navigation, serif fonts, full left/right justification, ...

Screen reading was no different than paper reading for: orientation of the media, flicker rate, screen dynamics, and visual angles (< 36 degrees).