van Niekerk, Sjan-Mari

Dr Sjan-Mari van Niekerk is is a post-doctoral fellow at the Movement Analysis Laboratory, Department of Physiotherapy, Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Whilst working as a clinician, she observed the high incidence of spinal pain in office workers, but it was the number of high school learners complaining of spinal pain that concerned her. This sparked an interest in determining the underlining reasons for adolescent spinal pain related to sitting, which included 3D posture analysis. Her PhD work included the development and manufacturing of a "dynamic" computer school chair that facilitates an increase in postural changes whilst sitting. This work consisted of measuring and matching more than 700 high school learners to their current computer school chairs of which 97% of the learners did not match the chairs used in school computer laboratories. Dr Van Niekerk's current work is focusing strategies to prevent and decrease of spinal pain prevalence in the computer user population.  She is refining the “dynamic” computer chair for commercial perpouses as well as assessing the differences in postural behaviour when comparing seated to standing computer work.