For office seating the adjustable lumbar support is a well-established ergonomic requirement.
Most office chairs offer this feature, which allows everyone to find the right support
for their conformation and height.
A good office chair must guarantee prolonged comfort even for continuous use, for many hours a day.
In reality, however, there are several types of lumbar supports on the market; in this post we are going to analyze them in detail, ranking them in order of increasing ergonomics.
1D lumbar support
This type of lumbar support is height adjustable, for example like this:
2D lumbar support
Office chairs with this type of support offer both a lumbar height and depth adjustment.
The depth adjustment, although not required by the international Standard, allows the back to be adjusted in a way that better suits to the user’s back, and is therefore certainly more advanced from an ergonomic point of view.
A scientific research published in an authoritative journal of Ergonomics* has recently introduced a new valuable concept.
In fact, it has been demonstrated that most users, if possible, would adjust the lumbar support in an “asymmetrical” way, meaning in a different way between the right and left side of the back.
All in all this is intuitive, because in nature asymmetry is the most natural and widespread condition.
So we arrive to the
Asymmetric lumbar support
The asymmetrical lumbar support allows for different height adjustments on the two sides of the backrest, the right and left side.
Here are some examples of asymmetrical lumbar support, like this one:
or this:
Asymmetric 2D lumbar support
Finally products like the range Skena from Dile Office, recently introduced in during last Orgatec edition, offer a 2D asymmetrical lumbar support, adjustable both in height and depth:
This type of lumbar support is so far the state of the art, the most advanced ergonomical solution the market can nowaday offer as it enables the finest lumbar positioning.
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* Tycho K. Fredericks, Steven E. Butt, Anil R. Kumar – ERGONOMICS/Dec 2005 – Do users desire symmetrical lumbar supports in task seating?