Assessment of local discomfort in common pencils and ergonomic pencil designed with local discomfort scale in elementary school students

The design of tools may play an important role in development of the problems related to hands and arms. The health and satisfaction of those who use these tools can be affected by the improvement of ergonomic tools. This research aims to assess the local discomfort caused by the usage of common pencils comparing to the ergonomic ones.
50 right-handed students (girls only) participated in this study. They wrote one paragraph using all the writing tools that were being studied in this research. At the end the comments were collected using the LPD questionnaire and were analyzed by t-test and Mann-Whitney test and SPSS version 23.
The results of the CHQ questionnaire showed that this questionnaire could be a useful tool for assessing the comfort of using writing tools among students in the school environment. Also, the results from the LPD scale showed that this scale could be very helpful for assessing local perceived discomfort among school students. In the second part, the results of the comparison of the mean of data from the CHQ questionnaire and the LPD scale showed that there is a significant difference between the common pencils and the designed pencil for comfort and local perceived discomfort.
It was found that common pencils cause pain, pressure, inflammation and numbness in the hands and forearm and shoulder. And the use of designed ergonomic pencil will reduce the pressure and pain on the hands and shoulders.