A Methodological Approach to the Determination of the Cause-Effect Relations in Automotive Seating Comfort

Comfort in automobile seats is multifactorial and extremely complex problem. Many of the current sophisticated measuring tools are underexploited if they are not framed into a clear methodological approach. The goal of this paper is to present the application of the user oriented methodology for the generation of design criteria in automobile seats design.

With this purpose, each tool is set in a conceptual cause-effect scheme in the seat analysis process, from an ergonomic point of view. As a practical application, three different nowadays driver seats are evaluated using this model by means of laboratory testing and an experimental set with 6 people in a long-term driving simulation test.