An appropriate biomechanical model of seated human subjects exposed to whole-body vibration

Long duration automobile-induced vibration is the cause of many ailments to humans. Predicting and mitigating these vibrations through seat requires a good model of seated human body. A good model is the one that strikes the right balance between modelling difficulty and simulation results accuracy. Increasing the number of body parts which have been separately modelled and increasing the number of ways these parts are connected to each other increase the number of degrees of freedom of the entire model. A number of such models have been reported in the literature. These range from simple lumped parameter models with limited accuracy to advanced models with high computational cost. However, a systematic comparison of these models has not been reported till date. This work creates eight such models ranging from 8 to 26 degrees of freedom and tries to identify the model which strikes the right balance between modelling complexity and results accuracy. A comparison of the models’ prediction with experimental data published in the literature allows the identification of a 12 degree of freedom backrest supported model as optimum for modelling complexity and prediction accuracy.