Little is known of the patterns of physical activity, standing and sitting by office workers. However, insight into these behaviours is of growing interest, notably in regard to public health priorities to reduce non-communicable disease risk factors associated with high levels of sitting time and low levels of physical activity. With the advent and increasing availability of indoor tracking sy...

Even though knowledge management has been around for more than a decade, so far concrete instruments that can be systematically deployed are still rare. This paper presents an optimization solution targeted at flexible management of office space considering knowledge management criteria in order to enhance knowledge work productivity. The paper presents the Flexible Office conceptual model and ...

Dear Editor-in-Chief " Musculoskeletal discomfort of the neck, shoulder and lower back affects individuals and has socioeconomic outcomes; it is the most common global musculoskeletal disorder " (1, 2). The highest rate is seen in industrialized societies, in which 70-80% of adults are affected at some time. Around 1% of those living in the USA suffer recurrent bouts of this disorder (3). Creat...

We designed an office cubicle that automatically mediates communications between co-workers by sensing whether users are candidate members of the same social group. The cubicle regulates visual interactions through the use of privacy glass, which can be rendered opaque or transparent upon detection of joint orientation. It regulates auditory interactions through noise-canceling headphones that ...

A revolution in the building industry over the past decade has spawned a new generation of safer materials and practices, decreasing some health risks for construction workers. Concerned consumers, builders, materials manufacturers, and government regulatory agencies have all contributed to a turn toward "green" building materials and practices, meaning that homeowners and office workers now ar...

BACKGROUND Sedentary behaviour is an independent risk factor for mortality and morbidity, especially for type 2 diabetes. Since office work is related to long periods that are largely sedentary, it is of major importance to find ways for office workers to engage in light intensity physical activity (LPA). The Inphact Treadmill study aims to investigate the effects of installing treadmill workst...

Introduction and Background Recent trends in today’s office environment make it increasingly more difficult for conventional centralized HVAC systems to satisfy the environmental preferences of individual office workers using the standardized approach of providing a single uniform thermal and ventilation environment. Since its original introduction in West Germany during the 1950s, the open pla...

The authors have developed a performance test, CPTOP2 (Cognitive Performance Test of Productivity), which consists of four task tests to evaluate cognitive abilities of office workers in order to quantitatively and objectively evaluate their productivity by controlling office environment. In addition, the testing time of CPTOP2 becomes shorter than conventional CPTOP2 in order to introduce it i...

The amount of water supply in Japan was 16 billion ton as of 1989. Water from rivers and other sources is purified, sterilized and then supplied to the residents through conduits. When conduits are accidentally damaged, they must be repaired by the workers of the Waterworks Bureau of the local government. In this task, the workers are exposed to airborne dust which develops while digging and fi...