Journal d'ergonomie
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Abstrait

Assessment of Occupational Health Hazards of the Computer Users

Malobika Gogoi 1*, Mira Kalita 2

Computers have become an important part of life and are widely used in the office workplace, which provides efficiency, comfort and the ability to carry out work within a short period of time. Practically, computers are standard and necessary device for all the employees engaged in private or in public sectors. Around 90 million adults in the world are using computer on a regular basis. Nearly 60 million people in the world are expected to have eye related problems because of using computer. The study is focused on assessment occupational health hazards and of the computer users and to identify the relationship between occupational health hazards with age, gender and years of involvement. The study was conducted in 110 computer users of four randomly selected institute of Jorhat, Assam. For the purpose interview method and pretested interview schedule was applied. Activity profile include information such as years of experience, total working hours, frequency of using computer at work, problems faced in the workspace, rest periods etc. For assessment of health hazards a three point rating scale was used. A 3 point scale was used as (Never=1), (Sometimes=2), (Often=3) to identify the occurrence of the different occupational health hazards among computer users. For identification of the association between the occupational health hazards with selected independent variables chi square test was applied. The findings showed that half of the respondents (50.90%) had a work experience of 9-12 years. Majority of the users (88.20%) spent 6-8 hours on computer every day. Only 20 per cent of the total respondents faced some of the problems in their work place. Almost half of the respondents (51.80%) took rest for 30 minutes. On analyzing the different occupational health hazards it was observed that headache was the most frequently occurring health hazards and rank-I similarly, head ranked-I with a mean of 2.29. It was found that there was no association between gender and occupational health hazards (‘p=0.510) but significant association between age (‘p=0.000**) and years of involvement (‘p=0.004**).