ADVANCED HUMAN BODY MODELLING FOR HUMAN CENTRED DESIGN: TRENDS AND SOLUTIONS Niels CCM Moes Imre Horv´ ath Delft University of Technology, Dept OCP/DE Section Integrated Concept Advancement Landbergstraat 15, 2628 CE Delft, the Netherlands C.C.M.Moes@IO.TUDelft.nl, I.Horvath@IO.TUDelft.nl The research for human body modelling for application in the shape design of artefacts for physical interaction is calling for technologies of increasing power. Three main aspects for research were recognized: geometric model- ling, the modelling of physical-physiological behaviour, and the implementa- tion in the design of the shape of the contact area. First research in this field is mentioned. Introduction The massive amount of publications on modelling human bodies or body parts shows a strong need for human body models. Most of the reported models are conventional ones supporting for instance ergonomics, industrial design, medicine and animation (Dirken, 1997). Each field puts its specific requirements for the models. In the field of physical ergonomics efforts were made to develop human body models for capturing complex re- lationships between external loads and physiological effects. It has given impetus to the research in advanced human body modelling, which tries to capture complex body charac- teristics, such as assemblies of tissues, uncertainty of a shapes (Carter and Heath, 1990), effects of dynamic loads on stress and deformation (Levine et al., 1990; Goossens, 1994), the relationships with the human body type (Kernozek et al., 2000), structural changes in person-artefact interaction, biophysical changes of body parts and tissues (Dahlin et al., 1986), and complex constitutive behaviour (Malinauskas et al., 1989; Zhang et al., 1997). Although several authors expressed the wish to have all-embracing body models covering all these kinds of characteristics, due to the complexity of problems, lack of data, and pro- cessing power they had to apply and accept certain simplifications (Hubbard et al., 1993). What has been achieved related to these characteristics? Only a few characteristics have been seriously considered for investigation and incorporation in conventional body models, for instance geometric aspects (Zajac et al., 1986; Zhu et al., 1998) and the con- stitutive behaviour (Vannah and Childress, 1996) of the anatomical tissues. Currently the nominal shape of the tissues can be reproduced by geometric models (Ramirez, 1992; Todd and Wang, 1996), but generic rules are still missing. Models to simulate the constitutive behaviour are still based on purely elastic behaviour that have been developed for rubber materials (Moes, 2002), although there are publications on multi-phase modelling (Oomens et al., 1987). It is also a problem that conventional body models show a lack of compatib- ility due to differences in dimensionality, geometric simplifications, and ability to handle