Astronauts have complained of difficulty in grasping tools, hand fatigue, and hand/forearm pain during extravehicular activities. This study was conducted to examine hand grip performance with a bare hand and in a spacesuit glove at two different pressures, with three hand positions and two elbow positions. Sixteen subjects, selected from the suited-subject pool at the Johnson Space Center, gripped a hand dynamometer encased in a vacuum chamber designed to simulate the operating pressures in space. The results for the bare hand condition showed a significant effect for hand position and a significant elbow/hand interaction. The spacesuit glove at operating pressure was responsible for an average 42% grip strength decrement from the bare hand condition. A new procedure for determining hand size from projected hand surface area revealed that bare and gloved-hand grip strength was highly correlated with hand size, as were body weight, height, and forearm circumference. / M. S.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/91148 |
| Date | January 1986 |
| Creators | Roesch, J. Richard |
| Contributors | Industrial Engineering and Operations Research. Human Factors Engineering |
| Publisher | Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis, Text |
| Format | viii, 145 leaves, application/pdf, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
| Relation | OCLC# 15788172 |
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