International Journal of Scientific & Engineering Research, Volume 5, Issue 6, June-2014 17 ISSN 2229-5518 IJSER © 2014 http://www.ijser.org Ergonomic evaluation of Ingress/Egress of vehicle using balance assessment approach Simranjeet Singh, Jagjit Singh, Parveen Kalra Abstract—Ergonomic features are needed to be introduced into the design of buses to make them highly comfortable for the driver and passengers. There is a possibility of addition of lot of ideas and techniques in the pre-manufacturing stage of products especially in case of vehicles to make them more ergonomic. Maintaining Balance of body while interacting with vehicles (e.g. during activity of Ingress/Egress etc.) is one of the key ergonomic issue. Furthermore, this area needs more exploration and easy methods of balance assessment. Center of pressure (COP) trajectory, Center of mass (COM) trajectory, Movement sway etc. are found to be the good quantitative measures of postur- al control and balance of human body. The methods which use the above mentioned quantitative measures can be very easy to implement with some easily available and low cost equipment like “Wii balance board and Microsoft Kinect” which are good alternatives of expensive “force plates and Vicon camera” .In present paper, the work carried out by various researchers in field of ergonomics of ingress of vehicles (especially buses) is discussed. A possible methodology of evaluation of ergonomics of ingress is also suggested. Index Terms— Center of mass, Center of pressure, Egress, Ergonomics, Ingress, MS Kinect, SESC, WBB Nintendo ——————————  —————————— 1 INTRODUCTION HIS paper deals with the review of background research of vehicle ergonomics with a focus on Ingress/Egress ac- tivities of driver. ‘Maintaining balance of human body in motion is one of the sophisticated phenomena to study. There are some important parameters essential for assessment of balance of human body. Some of the important parameters are COM, COP & COG. Center of mass (COM) is the point where whole mass of the body is supposed to be acting. COM can also be defined as a point about which a body would balance without a tendency to rotate. Center of pressure (COP) is the location on the supporting surface where the resultant vertical force vector would act if it could be considered to have a sin- gle point of application. Center of gravity (COG) is the vertical projection of COM to the ground. A shift of the COP is an in- direct measure of postural sway & thus a measure of person’s ability to maintain balance. All people would sway in anterior- Posterior direction (forward-Backward) & the medial-lateral direction (side to side) when they are simply standing still. This is due to the misalignment of the line of action of COP and COG, due to which the disturbing moment generates. In contrast, the physics and basic Mechanism of Dynamic bal- ance (balance of moving body), is entirely different in compar- ison to that of static balance. This is due to the fact that while in motion, the body essentially needs to generate the disturb- ing moment for accomplishing the forward movement. COP trajectory, COM trajectory of human body are proved to be very good estimates of postural balance. With these parame- ters the dynamic balance of human body while interacting with vehicle can be quantified for different sets of design vari- ables (design variables refer to the variables governing the shape and geometry of vehicle body with which human body has to maintain the dynamic or motion interaction). Now as far as the calculation of COP trajectory, COM trajectory, pos- tural sway etc. is considered, force plates and expensive mo- tion capture systems provide a way to directly calculate these measures. However these equipments are very costly. “Wii balance board” of Nintendo and “Kinect for windows” of Mi- crosoft can be very low cost and reliable alternatives of the costly instruments mentioned above. MS Kinect is a motion capturing system which can produce a 3D skeleton video of the human body in motion and can help in computing center of mass of body. It can also track the values of various body joint angles during the movement of body. On the other hand Wii balance board of Nintendo is helpful in getting the posi- tion of COP of body. Now application part of assessment of balance which is relevant to current discussion is to optimize the vehicle design parameters in order to produce the safe vehicular design (especially safe for ingress and egress). This review article suggests the application of balance assessment approach in vehicle design phase so as to optimize the design for safe ingress, egress and other activities which involve the dynamic movement of human body. 2 BACKGROUND RESEARCH 2.1 Review of study of Ingress/Egress The act of ingress represents the first and one of the most im- portant interactions of human body with vehicle. Drivers of heavy vehicles are frequently injured entering and exiting the vehicle. Getting out of a truck and bus cabin is a very complex Motion and it is very accident-prone. Drivers or firemen are frequently injured entering and exiting trucks (Patenaude et al. 2001, Lin and Cohen 1997). One of the works is associated with strategic analysis of truck cabin egress motion (Chateau- roux et al, 2011). The experiment was performed to investigate the influence of COE truck architectural parameters on motion T ———————————————— • Simranjeet Singh is currently pursuing master’s degree program in Industrial Design in PEC University of technology, Chandigarh, India, PH- +919896104878. E-mail: singh.hctm@gmail.com • Jagjit Singh is Asst. prof. in Production and Industrial Engg. Dept., PEC University of technology, Chandigarh, Sector 12 INDIA E-mail: Jagjit.singh@ pec.ac.in. • Parveen Kalra is Prof. and Head of Dept., Production and Industrial Engg. In PEC University of technology, Chandigarh. E-mail: parveenkalra@pec.ac.in. IJSER