Objective Evaluation of Hold Feeling for Passenger Car Seats

Modern automotive seats require improvements in their design, safety, comfort including sitting and riding comfort. Among those, seat comfort is known to be difficult to evaluate because the comfort is a human feeling. As an approach to evaluate the human comfort in an objective manner, an objective measure is proposed for seat riding comfort evaluation under low frequency vibratory conditions which represents typical roll and pitch motions of driving motor vehicles. The related feeling due to this low frequency vehicle motion is termed ‘hold feeling’ because the seated body may tend to deviate from the defined seating position under such vehicle motion input. Dynamic pressure measurements have been conducted in the frequency range up to 1.0 Hz to monitor the interface pressure change behavior of the seat-subject body. Temporal changes in body pressure in terms of the magnitude and the representative locations, and the time delay in pressure change at different segments of the seat are used for discussions related to the subjective test results. The proposed approach provides a reasonable and effective methodology to estimate the hold feeling of seats in an objective manner.