Importance of anthropometric measurement for designing relaxing Chair for restaurant workers

Restaurant workers, who works in the kitchen, doing the different activities in continuous standing posture and spent most of the time inside the buildings and therefore experience the greatest amount of exposure while performing various activities and at greatest risk. The workers working in the restaurants withstand the pressure, string of working for long hours, suffering from high blood pressure due to prolong standing posture, lifting heavy pots and kettles and working near hot ovens and grills. An occupational hazard includes slips and falls, cuts and burns. Restaurant relaxing chair is one of important furniture design that cause people especially who work in the restaurant feel comfortable after prolong stand. Each parts of chair should be designed properly so that it can have more ergonomics characteristics to ensure the user to get a good posture. It also can assist the user to minimize fatigue and injury by fitting the chairs to the body size, and also suggest the strength and range of movement. Correct sitting and standing posture is an important factor for the prevention of musculoskeletal symptoms. Therefore, the study was undertaken design of ergonomically functional and aesthetically sound relaxing chair for kitchen related standing activity. For the present study 120 workers were selected from the four south Indian restaurant i.e. Sri nidhi sagar, Raaga the family restaurant, Tamarind and Inchara the family restaurant, Bangalore city, Karnataka State. Descriptive cum experimental research design was used for the present study. Purposive sampling procedure was followed to select the sample and data was gathered by interview method. It was found that the restaurant workers faced lot of problems due to non availability of relaxing chair at their work unit. Hence due to prolong standing posture and, continuous working hours and absence of relaxing of body they suffered with arthritis problem, lower and upper back problem, headache, swelling on ankles, stiffness in leg and hand joints, numbness in body, reduced grip strength, limiting movement of fingers etc