Abstract
Courses on ergonomics, occupational health, safety, and work design are usually present in engineering programs, providing an opportunity for raising students’ awareness of the importance of work sciences. However, the distribution of these courses across different engineering specializations is unclear. This paper analyses 71 engineering programs from five specializations (chemical, civil, electrical, industrial, mechanical), from 10 Brazilian universities to identify courses related to the Work Engineering (WE) field, which articulates ergonomics, work design, and occupational health topics. In total, 89 unique courses were found, occurring 113 times across the programs analyzed. The Industrial Engineering programs were the ones with the most relevant courses (62,5% of the programs had 3 or more WE-related courses). The analysis of the titles of the courses highlighted that “work”, “safety” and “ergonomics” were the most recurrent themes addressed in the courses. On the other hand, the topic “health” is practically ignored in Brazilian engineers’ training. In general, the results emphasize the relatively small number and uneven distribution of WE courses in engineering programs, further supporting the need to build an interdisciplinary field of knowledge applied to engineering and in close collaboration with Ergonomics.
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Paravizo, E., Fonseca, M.L.F., de Lima, F.T., Gemma, S.F.B., Rocha, R., Braatz, D. (2021). How Ergonomics and Related Courses Are Distributed in Engineering Programs? an Analysis of Courses from Brazilian Universities. In: Black, N.L., Neumann, W.P., Noy, I. (eds) Proceedings of the 21st Congress of the International Ergonomics Association (IEA 2021). IEA 2021. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 219. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74602-5_78
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74602-5_78
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