| Summary: | 碩士 === 臺灣大學 === 職業醫學與工業衛生研究所 === 96 === An objective measurement tool, VDTlog, was developed to collect the information regarding total computer use time additional to keyboard and mouse use times among VDT users. VDTlog has been proved for its reliability and accuracy as a monitoring program. The aim of the present study was to validate the estimates of computer use time generated by VDTlog and by self-report, respectively, as compared to the corresponding estimates by video record observation. In addition, the appropriate idle time settings for VDTlog monitoring system were also evaluated for the estimates of total computer, keyboard and mouse use times, respectively.
Twenty-four study subjects, who all were research assistants and worked in the author’s graduate school, were recruited in the study and monitored by video taping and VDTlog simultaneously for three hours. In addition, they were also asked to report their own estimates regarding the duration spent on the computer use for each study hour and for the total three-hour period, respectively. The estimates by video record observation were conducted independently by two raters and used as golden standard in the following comparison.
The results indicated that there was a good agreement between the estimates of computer use time by VDTlog and those by video record observation (r>0.95). Furthermore, when the idle time settings for computer, keyboard and mouse use time estimates were set 20~35, 2.5 and 2.5 seconds, respectively, the use time estimates by VDTlog showed a high correlation with and the least relative error compared to the corresponding estimates by video record observation. However, the computer use time estimates by self-report were only correlated with those by video record observation at moderate level (r=0.54) and presented distinct overestimation, especially for the keyboard use time. It was concluded that VDTlog yields fairly accurate estimates for the duration of computer use and could be used to substitute self-report in the computer work load assessment.
Further study is warranted to explore the relationship between the indicators derived from VDTlog monitoring data and specific physical and psychological conditions. Moreover, VDTlog can be applied in large-scale longitudinal epidemiological study in workplace to help link computer workload with the incidence of upper extremity disorders. Furthermore, VDTlog is expected to be further developed as a diagnostic tool to identify the risk factor during computer work and a reminder for the preventive intervention.
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