Technical Paper
A Preventive Evaluation of Perceived Postural Comfort in Car-Cockpit Design: Differences between the Postural Approach and the Accurate Muscular Simulation under Different Load Conditions in the Case of Steering-Wheel Usage
2016-04-05
2016-01-1434
The evaluation of perceived comfort inside a car during the early stages of the design process is still an open issue. Modern technologies like CAE (Computer Aided Engineering) and DHM (Digital Human Modeling) already offer several tools for a preventive evaluation of ergonomic parameters for car drivers using detailed CAD (Computer Aided Design) models of car interiors and by a MBS (multi-body-system) solver for evaluating movements and interactions. Such evaluations are, nonetheless, not sufficient because the subjectivity of comfort perception is due to factors that are very difficult to evaluate in the early stage of design. Physical prototypes are needed and these are often too expensive to be realized.
