Recently on the progress of the information industry, the use of VDT(Visual´ Display Terminal) in school and home, is highly increasing. So it is necessary to find out the relationship between the use of VDT and the health status of children, who are in physical growth and development. Therefore, the purposes of this study were to observe the condition of the use of VDT by elementary students and the subjective symptoms they showed on their use of VDT, and to check the relationship between the use of VDT and the subjective symptoms. This investigation was made by performing a research on 621 students in the sixth grade of several elementary schools in Seoul The results of this study were as follows.
1. The children´s time of sleeping was 8 hour 25 minutes, their time of studying was 3 hour 23, minutes, and their time of recreation and exercise was 2 hour 38 minutes. The female students´ time of studying was longer than that of male students and the male students´ time of recreation and exercise was longer than that of female students.
2. The distribution of time of watching TV per weekday was as follows = about 2 hour 38.5%, more than 3 hours 34.9%, about 1 hour 20.2%, and no-watching 6.4%. From these results, it can be concluded that most of children watch TV.
3. The distribution of learning computer was as follows : sometimes doing in school and educational institutes 77.7%, often doing in school and educational institutes 18.6%, sometimes doing at home 203%, and often doing at home 19.9%. The average time per one time of studying was 1 hour 2 minutes at home, 54 minutes in school and educational institutes.
4. The distribution of playing video game was as follows : in case of using computer, sometimes doing 43.6%, often doing 22.2%, in case of using home video game machine, sometimes doing 27.5%, often doing 19.1%, and in case of using the electric game machine rooms, solitaires doing 215%, often doing 18.2%. The male students´ time of playing was longer than that of female students and the average time per one time use of 3 VDT were home video game machine 1 hour 14 minutes, electric game machine rooms 54 minutes and computer 53 minutes respectively, where female and male students ;showed a great differences(p<0.01).
5. Time of studying and time of recreation and exercise were closely related to the watching time of TV, learning time of computer, time of playing video games all.
6. By using the VDT, the most appealed subjective symptom was ´eye exhaustion(80.5%)´, and then in the following order : `becoming sleepy, yawning´ , ´feeling dizzy´ and ´laving a headache´.
7. The time of using VDT and the subjective symptoms had a significant relation(p<0.01), and in particular the relationship between time of watching TV, time of playing video games and the mental subjective symptoms was very close.
8. 81.5% of children knew the bad influences of VDT to their health, and only 64!0% of them had the experiences of trying to reducing the influences of VDT.
|