Ankle Pain and Disability in Foot Pedal Sewing Machine Operators

Apparel manufacturing is a labour intensive assembly line process requiring significant amounts of repetitive, skilled manipulation. Various studies have identified relatively high frequencies of musculoskeletal discomfort among sewing machine operators. The tailors (sewing machine operators) used foot-operated sewing machines with the machine serving as work table. From the diverse seating devices observed, no ergonomic considerations were made in the selection, purchase and fabrication of these seating devices. There is hence reason to suspect that various non-ergonomic types of sitting devices could be partly responsible for the musculoskeletal discomforts among sewing machine operators.it was hypothesised that since sewing machine operators performed repetitive movement is order to operate the foot pedal, it could lead to repetitive stress injury at the ankle joint.