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ISSN 1051-9815 (P)
ISSN 1875-9270 (E)
Impact Factor 2024: 1.7
WORK: A Journal of Prevention, Assessment & Rehabilitation is an interdisciplinary, international journal which publishes high quality peer-reviewed manuscripts covering the entire scope of the occupation of work. The journal's subtitle has been deliberately laid out: The first goal is the prevention of illness, injury, and disability. When this goal is not achievable, the attention focuses on assessment to design client-centered intervention, rehabilitation, treatment, or controls that use scientific evidence to support best practice.
WORK occasionally publishes thematic issues, but in general, issues cover a wide range of topics such as ergonomic considerations with children, youth and students, the challenges facing an aging workforce, workplace violence, injury management, performing artists, ergonomic product evaluations, and the awareness of the political, cultural, and environmental determinants of health related to work.
Dr. Karen Jacobs, the founding editor, and her editorial board especially encourage the publication of research studies, clinical practice, case study reports, as well as personal narratives and critical reflections of lived work experiences (autoethnographic/autobiographic scholarship),
Sounding Board commentaries and
Speaking of Research articles which provide the foundation for better understanding research to facilitate knowledge dissemination.
Narrative Reflections on Occupational Transitions, a new column, is for persons who have successfully transitioned into, between, or out of occupations to tell their stories in a narrative form. With an internationally renowned editorial board,
WORK maintains high standards in the evaluation and publication of manuscripts. All manuscripts are reviewed expeditiously and published in a timely manner.
WORK prides itself on being an author-friendly journal.
WORK celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2015.
*WORK is affiliated with the Canadian Association of Occupational Therapists (CAOT)* *WORK is endorsed by the International Ergonomics Association (IEA)* *WORK gives out the yearly Cheryl Bennett Best Paper Award*
Abstract: In an increasingly faster paced innovative world, maintaining the ability to innovate in spite of an aging work force will become every company’s strongest leverage for success. Tapping the latent knowledge resources and creativity of overlooked employees and persisting crucial information for business conduct are promising results for social networking sites (SNS) in a working context. Usability and usefulness are exponential factors in creating a successful SNS. In order to make a SNS usable for a heterogeneous user group, analyses of user diversity in regard to social media need to be done. Furthermore differences in communication medium and frequency in…regard to age, content, hierarchy position, departmental thresholds and company size need to be analyzed. For analysis purposes both qualitative and quantitative research methods were applied. Strong effects of age and communication content were found in survey with 194 participants.
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Keywords: social networks, user diversity, survey, SNS, collaboration, acceptance
DOI: 10.3233/WOR-2012-0625-3459
Citation: Work,
vol. 41, no. Supplement 1, pp. 3459-3467, 2012
Abstract: Work in organizations requires a minimum level of consensus on the understanding of the practices performed. To adopt technological devices to support the activities in environments where work is complex, characterized by the interdependence among a large number of variables, understanding about how work is done not only takes an even greater importance, but also becomes a more difficult task. Therefore, this study aims to present a method for modeling of work in complex systems, which allows improving the knowledge about the way activities are performed where these activities do not simply happen by performing procedures. Uniting techniques of Cognitive…Task Analysis with the concept of Work Process, this work seeks to provide a method capable of providing a detailed and accurate vision of how people perform their tasks, in order to apply information systems for supporting work in organizations.
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Keywords: Cognitive Systems Engineering, Health Care, Work Process five
DOI: 10.3233/WOR-2012-0626-3468
Citation: Work,
vol. 41, no. Supplement 1, pp. 3468-3475, 2012
Abstract: Current industrial processes often involve the collaboration of people at distant and remote locations. The technological media for such a tele-cooperation reach from simple email or text-based chatting systems to highly-sophisticated systems for an interactive video-conferencing. But with limited bandwidth the communication between persons at distant locations is often restricted to single modalities. Although this may still be suitable for some tasks, it may result into serious shortcomings and decreased performance with complex tasks like cooperative assembly or maintenance. This is because restricted communication reduces the availability of a common ground, i.e. sharing a common understanding of knowledge, opinions, and…goals. The study presented in this paper examines the effect of different communication media on performance of a collaborative assembly task. The results show that tele-cooperation leads to additional verbal communication (AM(direct)=71.1s; AM(video)=145.6s; AM(audio)=204.7s) and, thus, longer times to complete the task (AM (direct)=45.95 min; AM (video)= 50.2 min; am AM(audio)=56.16 min). The percentage of relative speech duration also increases significantly. Workload measurement with NASA-TLX did not show any significant differences between cooperation modes. The results allow estimating the effect of reduced communication modalities on time to complete an assembly task. This facilitates a quantification of temporal requirements in time-critical maintenance and repair tasks.
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Abstract: In this paper, we present an original environment, the Distributed Collaborative Design Studio (DCDS) which allows multimodal real-time remote exchanges, and which aims at re-creating remotely the conditions of co-present meetings. This environment associates a videoconference tool (supporting verbal and non-verbal communication) and an original realtime shared digital hand-drawn sketches system (supporting graphical communication). The users can import documents and annotate them in real-time at distance. In this paper, we are interested in studying the use of the graphical modality (digital sketch and document annotations) as a tool for collective design and remote communication. This study takes place in the…framework of a collaborative architectural design studio, which has taken place during 3 month, and gathering students from Belgium and France to work together in 3 small groups mainly at distance. The study focuses on the role of graphical modality in the synchronous remote meetings supported by the DCDS. We identify the types of digital annotations made on the imported document, thanks to the electronic pen, and their role in the cognitive processes of designing and in the collaboration and communication processes. We also identify the different practices of digital sketching, according to the group and its collaborative strategies. We discuss the utility of the graphical modality as an efficient support for collaborative synchronous activities and show that the DCDS environment supports different strategies of collaborative design (co-design and distributed design). We conclude on recommendations for improving the system and for designing sketch-based collaborative environments.
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Abstract: In the areas of design, especially in architectural design, collaboration has become an important challenge. The specialization of skills increase, work teams are more and more extensive and the geographic distance between them increases too. The economic and ecological stakes related to remote collaboration are an evidence. This context involves the need to support most efficiently possible remote working meetings. We present the Distributed Collaborative Digital Studio (DSDC), a tool designed to recreate, in distant situations, the context of copresence meetings. This shared environment is created in the “invisible computer” approach [11]. The idea is that the tool should disappear…from user’s consciousness. Indeed, creative design activities require some fluidity in their process. Therefore, any involuntary interruption created by the system can potentially brake creativity. In this perspective, we investigate specifically the “invisibility” of our environment. To do this, we propose a framework for the operationalization of the concept and a methodology to test the system invisibility. This methodology was applied through a case study consisting of a corpus of 12 hours of remote collaborative design sessions with the DSDC. We highlight the learning effects while using our system, conclude on its effectiveness and discuss our methodology.
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Abstract: The advent and adoption of internet-based social networking has significantly altered our daily lives. The educational community has taken notice of the positive aspects of social networking such as creation of blogs and to support groups of system designers going through the same challenges and difficulties. This paper introduces a social networking framework for collaborative education, design and modeling of the next generation of smarter products and services. Human behaviour modeling in social networking application aims to ensure that human considerations for learners and designers have a prominent place in the integrated design and development of sustainable, smarter products throughout…the total system lifecycle. Social networks blend self-directed learning and prescribed, existing information. The self-directed element creates interest within a learner and the ability to access existing information facilitates its transfer, and eventual retention of knowledge acquired.
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Keywords: Smart Products, service systems, Systems Engineering, Social Networking
DOI: 10.3233/WOR-2012-1035-3504
Citation: Work,
vol. 41, no. Supplement 1, pp. 3504-3510, 2012
Abstract: This paper presents, illustrates and discusses a generic framework for studying knowledge co-elaboration in online epistemic communities (“OECs”). Our approach is characterised by: considering knowledge co-elaboration as a design activity; distinguishing discussion and production spaces in OECs; characterising participation via the notion of role; fine-grained analyses of meaning, content and communicative functions in interactions. On this basis, three key issues for ergonomics research on OECs are discussed and illustrated by results from our previous studies on OSS and Wikipedia. One issue concerns the interrelation between design (task) and regulation. Whereas design task-oriented activity is distributed among participants, we illustrate that…OCEs function with specialised emerging roles of group regulation. However, the task-oriented activity also functions at an interpersonal level, as an interplay of knowledge-based discussion with negotiation of competencies. Another issue concerns the foci of activity on the (designed) knowledge object. Based on a generic task model, we illustrate asymmetry and distinctiveness in tasks' foci of participants. The last issue concerns how design-use mediation is ensured by specific forms of mediation roles in OECs. Finally we discuss the degree of generality of our framework and draw some perspectives for extending our framework to other OECs.
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Abstract: During employment of icons in order to represent system functions, specific user requirements from elderly people have not been scientifically gathered and thus will merely be considered during the process of system design. The survey, with explicit consideration of technology acceptance and experience of 120 elderly probands, looked into the comprehension of four different classes of non-animated graphical representations. It was shown that among elderly, the use of photos compared to pictograms or clip art leads to a significantly higher recognition rate. The mapping of actions rather than objects leads to a further reduction of the error probability and is…thus, especially in the context of telemedicine, preferable for the target group.
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Keywords: Icons, human-computer interaction, elderly, user study, usability
DOI: 10.3233/WOR-2012-0630-3519
Citation: Work,
vol. 41, no. Supplement 1, pp. 3519-3525, 2012
Abstract: On the basis of three empirical studies Fitts’ Law was refined for bivariate pointing tasks on large touch screens. In the first study different target width parameters were investigated. The second study considered the effect of the motion angle. Based on the results of the two studies a refined model for movement time in human-computer interaction was formulated. A third study, which is described here in detail, concerns the validation of the refined model. For the validation study 20 subjects had to execute a bivariate pointing task on a large touch screen. In the experimental task 250 rectangular target objects…were displayed at a randomly chosen position on the screen covering a broad range of ID values (ID= [1.01; 4.88]). Compared to existing refinements of Fitts’ Law, the new model shows highest predictive validity. A promising field of application of the model is the ergonomic design and evaluation of project management software. By using the refined model, software designers can calculate a priori the appropriate angular position and the size of buttons, menus or icons.
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Keywords: Fitts’, Law, bivariate pointing task, movement time, human factors of software-systems
DOI: 10.3233/WOR-2012-0631-3526
Citation: Work,
vol. 41, no. Supplement 1, pp. 3526-3532, 2012
Abstract: Main objective of the recently started collaborative research project SFB/TR29 B4 is to provide cross-generational assistance to human operators working in industrial product-service systems (IPS2 ). By combining the ideas of actionspecificity and multimodality a more immediate and purposeful reaction towards warnings is assumed. For this purpose, an action-specific warning system in form of a glove has been developed. It provides either visual, auditory or haptic feedback or a combination of all modalities. In a first study this prototype was compared with a conventional warning system, where multimodal devices were directly mounted to the machine. The test scenario used in…this study is the ‘changing of a spindle’ on a replica of a micro milling machine. It was conducted with 42 participants. The experimental design is a within-design in terms of the two warning systems and a between-design concerning the three modalities and its combinations. Results of the two-way ANOVA with repeated measures on both factors ‘system’ and ‘modality’ show a significant main effect for the ‘modality’ and a significant interaction effect between both factors. Especially the haptic warnings on the action-specific glove were described as “that kind of warning, which evokes the fastest response”.
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Keywords: action-specific warning, multimodality, cross-generational interface design, industrial product-service systems
DOI: 10.3233/WOR-2012-0632-3533
Citation: Work,
vol. 41, no. Supplement 1, pp. 3533-3540, 2012
