It wasn’t too long ago that you needed to be in your office to receive calls and at your desk to do most of your work. Technology, however, is changing that, enabling us to do more in more places. Thanks to smaller and lighter tools such as cell phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs), we can work while we’re traveling, visiting a local coffee shop, or walking the plant floor or construction site.
An emerging drawback from using smaller and smaller tools, however, has to do with ergonomics. Safety and health professionals who have had any ergonomics training know that bigger, more open hand grips are better than tight, closed pinch grips, and bigger hand movements are usually better than small or tiny hand movements. Yet most of the electronic tools that we now use require these smaller, tighter postures.