Quantitative analysis of transient body behavior during lateral-directional motion of vehicle occupant

Abstract

Recently, in the human-centered design of the car seat, mutual interactive relationship based on structural dynamics of the human-machine system has been analyzed, and this technique is used to the methodology for the automobile design. However, these topics have been studied for only vibration measurement in a steady state and studies to analyze human body behavior in practical lateral-directional transient acceleration have not been performed yet. The purpose of this study is to simulate biomechanical body behavior of vehicle occupant in lateral-directional transient acceleration. The proposed experimental device has characteristics of low cost and simplicity of use. The used experimental device is composed of the carriage, the car seat, rubber band, cushion, motion capture system and mobile force plate. In this paper, the seated body behavior with lateral-directional acceleration is simulated. Moreover, each joint angle and each ground reaction moment through the experiments are calculated and quantitatively evaluated by using this experimental device and singular value decomposition. As results of the experiments, each movement pattern reflected by lateral-directional transient acceleration is obtained as the remarkable feature quantities because the influences of the characteristic lateral-directional behavior on the human body are shown. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed measurement technique and method to analyze the biomechanical behavior of vehicle occupant during lateral-directional transient motion and its quantitative evaluation based on singular value decomposition are validated.

Keywords

• biomechanics
• automobile
• motion analysis
• experiment
• vehicle occupant
• transient body behavior
• car seat
• postural assessment
• singular value decomposition
• movement pattern