Research

Vehicle Occupant Safety & Accommodation

Traffic safety involves improving crash protection in the areas of seat belts, occupant accommodation and automatic protection systems, especially for the more-vulnerable vehicle occupants. Research by our group at UMTRI has shown that many drivers position the lap portion of the belt higher on the abdomen than would be ideal. I led a follow-up project that developed and evaluated the performance of a video-based intervention for improving belt routing obtained by drivers. My research has addressed child occupant safety by gathering data for child body shapes down to 12 months of age to obtain data useful in the design and evaluation of child restraint systems. I have also modeled the effects of body armour and personal protective equipment on body size and shape for military and law enforcement personnel. These models provide useful vehicle and workspace design guidance. My current research effort seeks to quantify the belt fit experienced by high BMI individuals to understand the increased risk of severe-to-fatal injury observed for obese vehicle occupants in crashes.

Engineering Anthropometry

Engineering anthropometry aims to improve the design of products and workspaces through the study of human physical dimensions and capabilities. To date my research has focused on characterizing body shape differences in functionally relevant postures. This methodology has been applied to children, aged 1 to 4, and obese adults in seated, supine, and standing postures. I have also applied this methodology to military applications, for which I developed an anthropometric protocol to quantify the additional spatial requirements of body-borne equipment using both traditional methods and 3D whole-body surface anthropometry.

Occupant Behavior and Dynamics

Automated vehicles have the potential to provide significant advantages to society, among these increased safety, access, improved mobility, and enhanced comfort.

Abrupt vehicle maneuvers that occur before a crash can affect occupant postures and may influence the level of protection provided by the occupant protection systems. As crash avoidance technologies and levels of automation advance, abrupt vehicle maneuvers may become more common. With my Biosciences colleagues, we have developed an experimental platform to enable the objective characterization of occupants’ responses to vehicle motion. The measurement method includes simultaneous measurements of vehicle motion and passenger kinematic responses using methods that intentionally obfuscate passengers. Functional data analysis methods are used to create statistical models of head and torso kinematics suitable for tuning and validating physical and computational human models.

Previous research has suggested that road-vehicle passengers are more likely to experience motion sickness than drivers of the same vehicles. If this pattern holds with automated (self-driving) vehicles, the deployment of these vehicles may result in an increased incidence of motion sickness. Automated vehicles provide an opportunity to mitigate motion sickness through control of the vehicle motion dynamics and vehicle interiors. Recently I led the development of a vehicle-based platform to study motion sickness in a passenger vehicle. The approach evaluate differences in motion sickness susceptibility to different acceleration levels under a driver’s control. This experimental platform builds on the in-vehicle methods described above with additional of simultaneous measurements of a passenger’s psychophysical and physiological responses during specified driving conditions.

Physical Ergonomic Assessment of Workplace Design

Accurate representation of task posture and force requirements are essential for assessment of worker capabilities given that the risk of injury is greatly increased when job task requirements approach worker capabilities. My doctoral research presents a systematic quantification of the relationship between task hand force, bracing forces and posture during force exertions that are kinematically constrained by an obstacle in the environment. This research generated models that enabled biomechanical analysis, simulation and prediction of human capability. These models are intended for ergonomic evaluation of industry jobs and have been implemented in the commercially available three-dimensional digital human avatar, Siemens Jack®, that is widely used in industry to conduct virtual ergonomic and safety assessments of products and designed environments. The primary objective during the course of my postdoctoral fellowship was to better understand and parameterize the effects of physical encumbrance of Canadian Armed Forces operators and its impact on warfighter performance and operational effectiveness. This research effort investigated the relative contribution of load weight, bulk, and stiffness to operationally relevant task performance. Evidence-based knowledge derived from this research informed decision-aid tools on the impact of encumbrance and identified strategies to mitigate physical burden.