• Project number: F 2118
• Institution: Arbeitsgemeinschaft ibe - Ingenieurbüro für Ergonomie, Feilbingert mit Ingenieurbüro Gillmeister, Dortmund
• Status: Completed Project

Description:

The demographic change leads to an employment of more older workers on the German job market within the next ten years. It's common knowledge that geriatric changes can cause losses in the sensory perception, the cognitive abilities and the physical strength in general. In order to compensate this various measures are suggested in literature, such as the alteration of the ergonomic design and the construction of hand-held machines. For this reason old age dependent factors that influence the handling and the accident and health risk in using hand-held machines are to be determined in the frame work of this project. Geriatric processes may have an influence on factors like grip force, feed force, on the holding and transporting the equipment and on the productivity. It is also possible that these processes increase the effects of noxious physical influence factors like noise, vibration and climatic stress on the human body. Therefore, such influence factors have to be evaluated depending on selected machine types, suggestions for a save product design have to be developed under consideration of old age dependant influences and fundamental solutions have to be produced.