Smart driving assistance systems : designing and evaluating ecological and conventional displays

In-vehicle information systems have been shown to increase driver workload and cause distraction; both are causal factors for accidents. This simulator study evaluates the impact that two designs for a smart driving aid and scenario complexity has on workload, distraction and driving performance. Results showed that real-time delivery of smart driving information did not increase driver workload or adversely affect driver distraction, while having the effect of decreasing mean driving speed in both the simple and complex driving scenarios. Important differences were also highlighted between conventional and ecologically designed smart driving interfaces with respect to subjective workload and peripheral detection

An Ergonomic Evaluation of Aircraft Pilot Seats

Seat comfort has become increasingly important in today\u27s society as we spend more time at consoles, instrument panels, or just online. However, seat comfort is hard to define and difficult to measure. Several measures both objective and subjective were used to evaluate seat comfort in commercially available average pilot seats. Three pilot seats, which had the same material and similar adjustments but different physical attributes, and a universal classroom seat, with different material and no adjustments, were compared by 20 volunteers using subjective and objective measures in a Latin square controlled repeated measures design. A Friedman\u27s test was used to determine that both the comfort questionnaire and the body-map rating results were able to discriminate objective comfort levels between the seats. One-way repeated measures ANOVA tests were used to analyze both the objective tests, actigraph and pressure pad data. All results indicated that one seat was clearly the most comfortable and another, the classroom seat was clearly the most uncomfortable seat. Furthermore, the overall comments per seat were compiled and compared to Fazlollahtabar\u27s 2010) predictive automobile seat comfort theory to determine which factors influence comfort perception. The use of both subjective and objective data can better distinguish comfort from one seat over the other. These results have implications for future tests of seats that will be used for long durations. Limitations and future recommendations are discussed later in the paper. An interesting finding may explain why pressure pad data are typically seemingly at odds with subjective measures of seat comfort

Design and Development of an Ergonomic Hybrid Forklift Seat

Ergonomic designs have positive impact on the end-user experience of any product. One of the main challenges is to accommodate a range of end-users, for which the concept of adjustability has been found to be very effective. The backrest in a forklift, for example, is provided for comfortable driving in the form of leaning/sitting postures. An ergonomic backrest has to consider the anthropometric variation in the human population to ensure optimum levels of comfort for everyone. This study provides a comprehensive methodology for developing an ergonomic backrest by combining the features of two different backrests and incorporating the adjustability concept into the design. Our study comprised of both, field and laboratory evaluations of the original and new designs for a variety of anthropometric characteristics (5th, 50th and 95th percentiles of both males and females). Using the phenomenon of restlessness, discomfort of the user was associated with the amount of body movement, where we have used the motion-capture system and the force platform to quantify the individuals’ movements. The results of the field evaluation indicated that the new backrest improved comfort during both static and driving tasks by ~10% and 23%, respectively. The results of objective metrics showed a reduction in the mean torso and the maximum center of pressure change of locations by 300 and 6 mm, respectively, for the new design. Further, the change in movement during the trials as assessed by the deviation in center of pressure measure was decreased (12%, p-value=0.32) for the new design, compared to the increase of 47% (p-value=0.0078) for the original design, suggesting that new backrest performed better over time. Based on these findings, the new design was further improved. Outcomes of this study may facilitate higher comfort levels to a wide range of forklift operators using a new adjustability concept

Smart system for aircraft passenger neck support

Air travel is becoming increasingly more accessible to people due to the availability of low cost air travel. However, long distance air travel is not a normal activity for human. During air travel, people experience different levels of physiological and psychological discomfort. The discomfort may affect the passenger’s health and feeling. With the rapid development of technology, the comfort of service has become an important issue. Nowadays, comfort is an attribute which is highly demanded by aircraft passengers. The comfort of aircraft passengers depends on different features and the cabin environment during air travel. Seat is one of the important features for the passengers and in which a passenger spends almost all their time during air travel. Different seat aspects have to be seen and taken into account in the comfort model. The research has five goals. First goal, literature research starts with the study on the state of the art and recent development of vehicle seat design which is available in current literature and products. The literature review gives a general idea about the research and the measurement method related to seating comfort and discomfort. Second goal, four surveys were conducted to identify the comfort factor of economy class aircraft passenger, body discomfort for truck driver, body discomfort for economy class aircraft passenger and relationship between seat location and sitting posture. The first survey is to identify and investigate the comfort factors for economy class aircraft passenger seat. Subsequently, survey on the body back sitting discomfort over travel time was conducted for truck driver and economy class aircraft passenger. The third survey is to investigate the relationship of the seat location and sitting posture of passengers in the economy class aircraft cabin. The postures of subjects were observed and recorded based on seven predefined sitting postures. Third goal, we contributed to develop a smart neck support system for economy class aircraft passenger. Our system aims to support and reduce neck muscle stress. A functional and working prototype was built to demonstrate the design concept and to perform experimental validation. Forth goal, we developed a low cost aircraft cabin simulator and we utilized it to validate our developed smart neck support system. The aircraft cabin simulator was built with motion platform and it is able to simulate a broad range of flight procedures. Next, a calibration experiment was conducted to investigate SCM muscle stress in relation to different support conditions, time interval and head rotation angle. Fifth goal, a validation experiment was conducted in the aircraft cabin simulator to evaluate the smart neck support system. The objective and subjective results show that the smart neck support system is able to reduce SCM muscle stress adaptively in a fully automate manner

Analysis of Human Motion Data for Vehicle Ingress Discomfort Evaluation

The ease of entering a vehicle, known as ingress, is one of the important ergonomic factors that car manufacturers consider during the process of vehicle design. This has motivated vehicle manufacturers to focus on assessing and improving ingress discomfort. With the rapid advancement in human motion capture and computer simulation technologies, one of the promising means to evaluate vehicle ingress discomfort is through analyzing human motion data. For this purpose, this dissertation will focus on proposing methods that analyze human motion data to evaluate vehicle ingress discomfort. The first part of this dissertation proposes a method for identifying and analyzing human motion variation patterns. The method uses a high-order array to represent human motion data and utilizes the Uncorrelated Multilinear Principal Component Analysis (UMPCA) method to identify variation patterns in human motion. The proposed method is capable of preserving the original spatiotemporal correlation structure of human motion data and provides better feature extraction than Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The method is applied to the ingress motion data to show its effectiveness in automatically detecting important motion variation patterns. The second part of this dissertation proposes a method for modeling the relationship between ingress motion and ingress discomfort ratings. The method presents a modeling framework that predicts subjective responses using human motion trajectories. The framework integrates curve alignment and data dimension reduction methods into the prediction model development. A case study is shown to demonstrate that human motion prediction models are more effective than simpler, more common ingress discomfort prediction models. The third part of this dissertation proposes a method for statistical hypothesis testing and sample size calculation for comparing ingress discomfort proportions of different vehicle designs. A dual-bootstrap method is proposed to estimate the standard deviation of ingress discomfort proportions estimated using a human motion prediction model. The proposed method is capable of separating the two sources of variation; the modeling variance, which results from the uncertainty in the estimated prediction models, and the sampling variance, which arises due to the randomness in the prediction dataset. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through an ingress case study. The research presented in this dissertation is applicable beyond the analysis of ingress motion data; it can be applied to many fields where human motion data is available. At a broader level, the research presented can be useful in the analysis of functional data of many types, with particular applicability to multi-channel time-series data.Ph.D.Engineering (Manufacturing)University of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116903/1/Thesis_Hadi_Final_Version.pd

Aerospace Medicine and Biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes, supplement 192

This bibliography lists 247 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in March 1979

Re-design of drivers’ car seat using three dimensional reverse engineering

Automobile seat design in current practice requires satisfying the ergonomics guidelines as well as considers the comfort expectation of the population. The main aim is to re-examine the existing car seat designs and to propose a novel seat design for better comfort. The number of cars reviewed for drivers’ seat features and user comfort are based on the analysis using a statistical tool. The statistical tool analysis is defined using data from the survey conducted. The proposed design is obtained using the 3-D Reverse Engineering procedure on the selected car seat models. The result is assessed to show that the modified car seat design is superior in terms of form, shape, seat features, usability and comfort. Through this work, the basic seat needs while driving, for example pain preclusion aspects and comfort weightage are defined. The survey done can expunge the expenditure for test experimentations in the future and the proposed methodology can be useful in establishing new design standards for the seat