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Bus drivers are daily exposed to whole-body vibrations (WBV) submitted to risks for develop health problems related to these conditions. Numerous studies focused to quantify and identify the risks that drivers are exposed have been developed in recent years. Many factors influence the transmission of vibration to the body. Road type may be an important factor in determining the WBV exposure a bus driver receives. In urban areas, common types of routes include several road surfaces like: smooth highway, older rough freeway, pavement, bumpy, speed humps, and others. The purpose of this study was to determine whether different kinds of road surfaces, found in urban routes, cause different WBV responses, and determine the influence for each road type in daily exposure to WBV according the standard ISO 2631-1 (1997).

This paper describes a project developed of a electronics instrumentation to obtain the needed data to compare the performance of differents agricultural tractors. A first system allows the measurement and recording of variables used in laboratory tests. The laboratory tests are made according to a technical standard used by agricultural tractors manufacturers. In this article, it will be presented the specific fuel consumption results for different characteristics and manufacturers tractors. In this case, this agricultural equipment were subjected to different working conditions in dynamometer tests. The performance of these vehicles also can be evaluated during a variety of agriculture business activities, such as transportation, preparation of soil, planting and harvesting. The second measurement system developed is an on board interface which allows registering the values of main physical parameters, needed to evaluate the performance of the tractor in field operation.

The human body exposition to vibration and to mechanical shocks may cause discomfort and physiologic alterations. Researches have been developed for at last 30 years, with the objective to find the human body behavior and the collateral effects caused when submitted to vibration. This is a present-day topic and worries the scientific community. Clinical investigations shows that vehicle drivers and industrial workers exposed to vibration and shock exhibit reduction of vertebral discs thickness [1] and epidemiologic evidences aim the human body exposition to vibration to be the principal cause of low back pain (LBP) [2, 3]. A four DOF model of the system composed of a seat and a person on it is considered, to describe the measured experimental curves of transmissibility in urban buses drivers. The model was adjusted to describe the measured transmissibility between the bus's ground and the seat, and between the seat and the driver's shoulder.