Abstract
Work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMDS) are a serious occupational problem in Taiwan. It is general believed that the causes of WMDS can be attributed to five factors, such as over exertion, frequent motion, prolonged duration, vibration and low temperature, and bad working posture. However, among these five causes, bad working posture will cause musculoskeletal fatigue and pain, especially in the neck, shoulder and lower back regions. The fatigue and pain will interact with the other four causes; significantly increase musculoskeletal stress in these regions. Therefore it is considered as triggering or catalyst factor among these five causes. In order to lower or eliminate WMDS, we should improve working posture in the first place: we proposed the adaptation of functional working posture, a functional working posture is the “most nature” and “most energy-saving” posture for performing that work. The purpose of this thesis is to improve workplace design of a bakery factory based on the concept of functional posture. A total of 10 workplaces were improved. These 10 workplaces include the transport of dough container, the placement of bread onto baking stand, bread packaging, topping decoration on pudding cake, recipe measurement, dough quality inspection, moon cake stuffing, whipping spreading on Swiss rolls, material feeding into mixers, stuffing feeding into the nozzle of machines. For each of these 10 workplaces, I visited the workplace, observed their work sequence, took photographs and video films, and measured their workplace dimensions. Then I analyzed their working postures, and came up with a most desirable function working posture based on the criteria of “naturalness” and “energy-saving. Finally based on these functional postures, new workplace design was proposed. Key words：Functional work posture, work-related musculoskeletal disorders, biomechanical.