Orthopedic chairs -

Personal workspace environment chair

As chairs become more and more a part of the working environment and specific tasks like IT (Information technology) become more dominant in the workplace, orthopedic chairs are being recognised to an ever greater degree.

There has never been a time when more working hours have been lost and more people have suffered from back, joint and muscular disorders and, amazingly, most of these people have sedentary occupations.

The importance of a good orthopedically supportive chair becomes more important as we spend more time in a seated position. If this posture is one from which we undertake processes and tasks, then the significance of posture and the chair’s support is even greater.

It follows from this that having a chair that is highly task oriented will improve comfort, health and even productivity, and this is the basis of most task and ergonomic chair designs.

There is however a new approach to tasking and ergonomics in the workplace that looks not just at chairs, but at integrating a chair with the other furniture or equipment required to perform the task.

The result of this is a personal workplace environment where the chair, desk unit and equipment are all considered (and often assembled) as a single interrelated unit.

Complete workspace environment

The big advantage to a workspace environment that is dedicated to a single operative performing one or more predetermined tasks, is that the environment can be customised precisely to the individual and the task(s) that they perform.

This means that the task chair, the desk or worktop, the workstation, the keyboard and the monitor are all viewed at integral parts of the whole and this means that they can be assembled in such a way that they interact together.

In other words, all components can be put together as one with, e.g. –

• The monitor being supported on an arm that extends from the frame of the chair and which is supported at eye level height.


• The keyboard being supported on another arm at the most ideal level and again connected directly to the chair.


• Any mouse mat zone or note writing zone being linked or extending from the chair and possibly (in the case of the latter) having the ability to fold away.

The advantages to this kind of task-chair-environment set-up are multi-fold.

• Firstly all of the furniture, and primarily the chair, are totally task based. Nothing is general purpose and everything is intended for a specific purpose.


• Secondly, aside from features like the keyboard position and the monitor angle and height being easily adjustable from the chair, they can also be set in positions that could not be attained using a normal office chair and desk.


• Thirdly, in the case of many of these environment workspace-chair set-ups, it is possible to adjust a feature like the angle of the chair’s backrest and have all of the other components (e.g. the monitor, the keyboard table etc) make correlating adjustments automatically. This means that you could periodically adjust your seating position whilst maintaining all of your other equipment settings in relation to your revised posture and new head position.

Ultimately these complete task environments will be the future for most office workers and, whilst they are already available, their cost is currently a prohibitive factor.