INCIDENCE OF HOME OFFICE RELATED POSTURAL PAIN DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Abstract

 Introduction: For an ideal posture, there must be a minimum muscle and joint stress, with the increase of this stress we will have a bad posture and when maintained incorrectly for a long period, postural pain arises. With the emergence of the new coronavirus, there was a need for social isolation and society's demand to benefit from the home office, where they started to perform their work in their own homes. However, due to the prolonged time that these individuals spent sitting in the same posture in front of the computer, they began to complain of pain arising from this bad posture. Objective: to verify the existence of postural pain in individuals who worked at home office during the COVID-19 pandemic and to analyze whether these postural pains were developed during the pandemic. Method: This is a cross-sectional, descriptive study with a quantitative approach, where 30 individuals who worked from home during the COVID-19 pandemic answered an authorial questionnaire with 25 questions. Results: The age of the individuals ranged from 21 to 59 years, where 53.3% of the sample already felt postural pain before starting the home office and after 73.3% felt postural pain, back pain was 40% and during the home office in the COVID-19 pandemic were in the neck (80%), where 60% of individuals reported that they remained with the trunk flexed. Conclusion: Therefore, this study showed that there was an increase in postural pain in individuals who worked from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, and these pains could have been minimized with appropriate ergonomic adjustments for each individual.