Human workplace and environmental factors

This book is designed with 4 chapters to provide fairly a comprehensive set of knowledge for the good fitting between humans and the surrounding workplace environment. It is also designed to provide a proper analysis of human-workplace systems. Its focus is on the surrounding workplace environmental and human factors which mainly affected the quality of workplace design and interaction with human beings. The book’s emphasis is placed on designing the tasks, environments, and workplaces with which humans work according to the suitable environmental and human factors to avoid mismatching between the workplace-task-environment and humans. In this book, the common thread is on how better human and environmental factors can lead to improved comfort, psychological acceptance, safety, pleasure, and efficiency in all components of work fields (workplace, task, and environment). The broad name of Ergonomics is human factors, as Ergonomics usually concerns mainly with physical human factors while human factors focus on the physical, psychological, social, cognitive, cultural, and organizational human factors which concern humans from all aspects. For example, sometimes the work becomes more cognitive in nature and less manual which may put more mental stress. Human factors, which are covered in chapter 3, are about analyzing and designing the workplace conditions with respect to individual capabilities to avoid or reduce the physical, mental, psychological, social, etc. stresses or hazards that which is covered primarily in Chapter 2. Same to human factors, environmental factors, which are enclosed in Chapters 3 and 4, (temperature, humidity, noise, illumination, vibration….etc.) are also concerned with a human providing a suitable workplace environment that tends to prevent any workplace environmental hazards. In addition, environmental factors help to improve indoor environmental quality and increase the productivity of workers inside workplaces. The author expects this book to be of use to individuals who work in engineering or medical fields. The book is designed with the aim of engineers and designers can design the workplace to be suitable for humans and medical health practitioners to provide advice to the workers inside the workplaces to adjust their body mechanics and protect them against workplace hazards. The author hopes that engineers, designers, and medical health practitioners will preserve the book and apply it in their careers.