An Integrated and Evaluated Simulation of Human-Seat Interaction

The seat is one of the most essential and concurrent complex interface between occupants and vehicles. In addition to seating comfort the seating position affects several aspects of ergonomics (reachability, visibility) as well as space, supports and constrictions.

In industrial ergonomic design the simulation of human-seat interaction currently makes use of the pragmatic H-Point offset approach. In order to overcome its shortcomings as limited prediction rate and required extensive measurements a new approach was developed. The research work covered modeling of several human-seat interaction aspects as torso posture, load distributions, contact skin surface and seated posture prediction.

All results were combined and integrated into the commercial ergonomic tool RAMSIS®. The human-seat interaction simulation was finally evaluated by extensive posture experiments and compared to the classical H-Point approach.

The present paper focuses on software integration and evaluation. The research contents are shortly presented as far as necessary for the understandings.