Comfort in Using Hand Tools

A recent dissertation out of Delft University (Netherlands), discusses Comfort in using hand tools: theory, design and evaluation.  You can download the document as a PDF (note - cover page is in Dutch, but document is written in English).

Kuijt-Evers covers the state of the art in measuring ergonomic comfort for non-powered hand tools and conducted empirical research to validate a set of qualitative comfort predictor for use in design and evaluation.

Here's the abstract:

Everyone uses hand tools in their daily life, like knife and fork. Moreover, many people use hand tools in their profession as well as during leisure time. It is important that they can work with hand tools that provide comfort. Until now, the avoidance of discomfort was emphasized during the design process of hand tools, like screwdrivers, hand saws and paint brushes. In the near future, the focus will shift towards providing comfort. However, some questions need to be answered to make this shift, like: What does the end-user mean with comfort in using hand tools? How can we translate this into hand tool design and the design process? How can we evaluate hand tools on comfort? These questions are answered in the current thesis.