The effects of respirator use on workers' productivity in a mentally stressing task

This article quantitatively determines the effect of wearing half-facepiece respirators, the most widely used type in industry, on worker productivity and efficiency in a mentally stressing task. An experiment investigated the performance of 10 subjects in a task simulating inspection of printed circuit boards. Accuracy and mean reaction time were tested automatically. Paced and unpaced task simulations were used to evaluate the effect of wearing the respirator on response times and the accuracy of subjects' responses for different product complexities and quality levels. The results indicated that wearing the respirator, in general, did not affect the speed or accuracy of subjects performing simulated inspection tasks. Pacing the task resulted in longer response times but did not affect accuracy. More complex products resulted in longer response times but also did not affect accuracy. High product quality resulted in longer response times and a higher miss rate. In terms of accuracy and reaction times a statistically significant difference was found in the performance of subjects.