Iowa software predicts impact of poor driving posture

It is claimed that human factors researchers and ergonomists could use this model to investigate the effect of head-neck posture on human response, performance, human machine interaction, and injury risk in whole-body vibration.

‘Studies have shown that awkward head-neck postures inside whole-body vibration environments can increase discomfort and the risk of injury,’ said Salam Rahmatalla, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and research engineer at the Virtual Soldier Research (VSR) program. ‘The goal of this project is to introduce a computerised human model that can be used to predict human motion in response to whole-body vibration when the human takes different head-neck postures.’

Rahmatalla is lead author of a paper entitled Human head-neck models in whole-body vibration: Effect of posture, that has been published online in the Journal of Biomechanics.

Rahmatalla conducted the study by having 11 male participants sit in a vehicle simulator where they were subjected to white-noise random vibration and the acceleration data of the head and neck for each was recorded.