It wasn’t too many years ago that the primary concerns in the area of occupational medicine were to prevent traumatic injuries in our industrial plants. Today, occupational health and safety concerns are focused on the office worker, particularly those workers who spend a considerable amount of time at computer displays. Even though these health problems are subtle compared to the serious injuries to which many blue collar workers are exposed, they have become a primary concern in large part because of our shift towards office jobs.

The vision problems at computers result in inefficiencies and in eye – related symptoms. The causes for the insufficiencies and the visual symptoms are individual vision disorders and / or poor visual ergonomics. The symptoms occur whenever the visual demands of the task exceed the visual abilities of the individual. For example, many individuals have marginal vision disorders such as uncorrected refractive errors, accommodative disorders, or binocular vision disorders which are not observed while performing less demanding visual tasks. Likewise, there are numerous aspects of the computer and its work environment which make it a more demanding visual task than others – therefore, more individuals are put beyond their threshold for experiencing symptoms.