Gold
Refine
Year of publication
Document type
- Article (peer-reviewed) (194)
- Conference Proceeding (42)
- Working Paper (7)
- Part of a Book (3)
Keywords
These days, many jobs like working in an office include sitting in chairs for a long time which could lead to work-related disorders such as musculoskeletal issues. Inappropriate postures can cause muscle fatigue in certain regions, resulting in pain and discomfort. Analysis of different types of postures to indicate discomfort could help us choose an optimal posture. This study evaluates five different sitting postures in an office chair for comfort and discomfort. Each posture was held for 18 minutes with a two minute break between postures. Six participants with an equal number of male and female subjects were chosen. The sitting posture correlates with the distribution of the weight on the seat, which can be measured by pressure sensors. The pressure distribution was obtained using a custom-built pressure mat and the average and the maximum pressure were evaluated. The McGill Questionnaire construct was used to find subjective discomfort at each minute. There was no difference in results for both sexes. Overall, leaning to one side was felt more comfortable while sitting with a curved back caused the highest discomfort.
Ergonomic assessment of manual work processes is important to prevent workplace injuries. Virtual reality simulations can be used to carry out an evaluation of work equipment and workplaces very early on. In combination with motion tracking analyses, data on posture during task performance and product use can then be collected. However, not all work situations can be equally represented in a virtual simulation. In particular, the virtual analysis of load handling poses a challenge in simulation, as body posture changes under the influence of external load weights. The aim is to increase immersion to bring the body movements in the virtual simulation closer to those in the real simulation with weights. For building up VR simulations with different aspects of visual, auditory and haptic immersion a scheme called immersion cube is presented. In order to be able to simulate load handling in VR, the immersion cube is used to investigate how much haptic immersion is needed to obtain sufficiently good data for the body movements measured in a VR setting. The first study showed that the deviation between real and virtual executions depends heavily on the task (lifting from the ground, move while standing, lifting over the shoulder). In some tasks, virtual and real simulation are very close to one another for certain body movements and could therefore in principle be used for ergonomic assessment. On the other hand there are still movements that vary between these two forms of execution and therefore show a need for increasing the immersion.