John D. Lloyd, PhD, CPE
Board Certified Ergonomist
32824 Michigan Avenue
San Antonio, Florida 33576
Tel: 813-624-8986
Email: DrJohnLloyd@Tampabay.RR.com
HumanTRAC- A New Method for Performing Rapid Ergonomic Product Assessments
Technical note describing a new method to facilitate ergonomic product evaluations.
A certain amount of realism is always lost when simulating ergonomic product assessments in a laboratory. Additionally, there exists an ever increasing need to perform rapid and accurate ergonomic assessments during the development cycle. To help address these challenges, a new system was constructed to facilitate ergonomic product assessments in a human-computer-aided design environment. The system incorporates 3-D electromagnetic, whole body tracking to allow for dynamic postural reconstruction and real-time biomechanical assessments.
Determination of system accuracy for repeated measurements of a three-dimensional linear vector compared with a known and calibrated measure indicated that the root-mean-square (RMS) error equals 0.0015m for a transmitter to receiver distance of 2.7m. The percentage error at this distance equals 0.06%. A similar assessment of angular line-of-sight indicated that the RMS error equals 0.28 degrees for the same distance. This new technology appears to allows for a high level of postural fidelity while modeling product use under realistic scenarios.
Please contact Dr. Lloyd for additional information