Perceived Comfort and Muscular Activity: A Virtual Assessment of Possible Correlations

Abstract

Generally, comfort may be defined as the “level of well-being” perceived by humans in a working environment. The state-of-the-art about the evaluation of comfort/discomfort shows the need for an objective method to evaluate the “effect in the internal body” and “perceived effects” in main systems of comfort perception. Some medical studies show that each human joint has its own natural Rest Posture in which human muscles are completely relaxed or at the minimum strain level. Basing on this assumption, in other studies postural comfort curves for each Degree of Freedom of human upper and lower-limbs joints have been studied and CaMAN software has been developed to have a direct interface with these curves. In this paper, the upper limbs’ postural comfort curves have been compared with the results gained by the biomechanics virtual simulation built on ANYBODY Software. A detailed study has been conducted on the upper body muscular activation during upper limbs movement with and without load. Postures have been analysed both by ANYBODY and CaMAN in order to correlate the postural (dis)comfort perception with the calculated muscular activity.