Effects of backpack’s weight on school children – a review

Abstract

A review of literature was conducted to search what are the past studies approach and observation related to the effects of school backpack carrying on primary school children below 12 years old and solutions in reducing the effects. Engineering Village, Science Direct and Google Scholars were searched with the following keywords: backpack, back pain, load, children, adolescent and physical fitness for related articles. Sixteen articles were reviewed to see the findings of past researchers. From the review we came to the conclusion that there are several factors which contributed to the risk of back pain and the effects can be observed through their gait postures response [3, 8, 9] physiological and psychological, [4, 7,10, 11, 16] and the ground reaction force during walking [12, 14] In summary, the change in postures include trunk leaning forward developing a experience of back pain, he time carrying pack may strongly contribute to back pain. Load should not exceed 15% of body weight. When carrying load of 15% of body weight, the children adopted a trunk inclination. This case is worsened when the load increase to 20% of body weight. This is because a significant effect was observed at load of 20% of body weight, where the GRF and trunk inclination increased almost three times.