Google trend tells us that search for ergonomic solutions during COVID-19 pandemic was increased

Dear editor

Recently, Wu et al. published a valuable article in your journal [1]. It shows the applicability of studying trends including the trends provided with Google, in gaining knowledge about hot topics in the field of occupational health and safety. We want to present this letter in response to their valuable article. Our article shares the same value of this topic for your readers.

From late 2019, the COVID-19 is at the top of the world’s news and has been able to attract most people’s attention. In response to this pandemic, lifestyle and behaviour of the people have changed. One of the most important behavioural changes in people has been the introduction of self-quarantine and teleworking [2, 3]. These behavioural changes have made people in need of relevant health solutions [4]. Internet-related data provides useful information on the most common knowledge searched by internet users worldwide [5]. So that some studies have shown internet analysis service like Google trends could potentially demonstrate the needed solutions and strategies [6]. One of the health solutions needed by people during this pandemic is to optimize the environment and what they do [7]. Ergonomics or Human Factors is the scientific discipline concerned with the understanding of interactions and optimizing these interactions among humans and other elements of a system. The application of solutions which was introduced by this discipline were presented by Gurses et al [8]. In the following part, we briefly present the searches of people related to ergonomics in the time period associated with COVID-19 pandemic.

Relevant information has been collected weekly from 7/5/2015 to 5/5/2020. For a closer look, the epidemic in Wuhan, China and the day which was pandemic has been declared by the World Health Organization has been marked with two signs. In the following chart, which is related to the search, it is clear from the average chart that the search trend has been increasing, so that after the announcement of the pandemic, this statistic has had an upward trend.