Development of Simple Detection Method of Involuntary Movements to Evaluate Human Discomfort in Vehicle Seat

Abstract

We have studied the evaluation of human discomfort with the seat fidgets and movements (SFMs). In our previous studies, we video-recorded the participants’ movements during all experiment and checked all video off-line to derive the SFMs frequencies of participants. In this methodology, our workloads were too heavy to obtain SFMs of participants. In addition, we sometimes missed SFMs of participants due to the occlusion problem like as right leg overlapped the left leg when we video-recorded the participant from right side with the single camera. Thus, we have studied a simple detection method of SFMs to evaluate personal discomfort in a vehicle seat. In this article, we described a new methodology with flex sensors and showed a possibility of SFMs extraction by observing the outputs of six flex sensors attached to participant body.