The Experimental Group (N = 10) presented significantly (p = 0.009) fewer complaints of back pain after an Intervention program in comparison to individuals who did not receive this type of information (Control Group).

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This paper presents a Virtual Reality (VR) system -ErgoVRthat is being developed to allow the visualization and measurement of Human behavior interaction's variables in virtual environments, to be mainly used in studies in Ergonomics in Design. The first section of the paper justifies this system's creation compared to the commercial solutions available. The second section describes the development of ErgoVR, in particular the definition of its concept and implementation in a User-Centered Design perspective. As the most important feature of ErgoVR, stands the automatic data collection of variables of behavioral interaction such as: dislocation paths, trajectories, collisions with objects, orientation of the field of view and occurrence of events triggered by user's actions. ErgoVR is being developed and validated in studies at the Ergonomics Laboratory of FMH -Technical University of Lisbon and serves as a tool for two research projects, supported by a grant from the Portuguese Science Foundation.

This paper presents a study which objective was to investigate the human interaction with the equipment of an office workstation (mouse, keyboard, monitor, paper sheets, pens and calculator) during the activities of reading, writing, data entry and navigation in a computer system for long periods of time and with ecological validation. A sample of 22800 observations, which corresponds to 760 work-hours of 30 office workers, was classified into sixteen Interaction's Categories (IC). The results show that the participants read on the monitor more than on paper and they had a larger use of the mouse instead of the keyboard. Findings of this study allow suggesting what graphical interface designers must seek for new strategies and solutions to reduce the mouse need, exploring other peripherals as keyboard or voice recognition devices; or, at least, diminishing the amplitude of movement with the mouse during the interaction with office's software like the Microsoft ® Office 2003.