ERGONOMIC EVALUATION OF LOW COST ADJUSTABLE WORKSTATION FOR ASSEMBLY OPERATION

Ergonomics is the science and technology of fitting the activities and environment to the abilities, dimensions, and needs of people to improve performance while enhancing comfort, health and safety (1) The objective of the present study was to investigate the effects of an ergonomically designed adjustable workstation for performing a repetitive industrial assembly task on operator performance and productivity. Ergonomically designed fully adjustable assembly workstations could be expensive for companies to adopt, especially the small scale industries. Therefore, a low-cost, ergonomically designed adjustable assembly workstation was designed, developed and evaluated for assembly of a product in a manufacturing company. Experiments were conducted on the existing fixed height and on the newly designed ergonomic assembly workstation using five industrial assembly operators. The operator performance on the ergonomically designed workstation was 29% higher compared to the existing non ergonomically designed fixed height assembly workstation. The increased performance was due to flexibility and ergonomic design features incorporated in the workstation.