Analysing Long-term Seating Comfort

The objective determination of seating comfort plays an important role for the development of seating systems. Currently the evaluation is based on subjective impressions and mainly focussed on static conditions. Objective methods are primarily based on evaluating the influence of vibrations on the driver or assessing the seat pressure distribution. Additional evaluations are done by using virtual human models which allow illustrating loads in various scenarios. Basically it is tried to correlate subjective ratings to objectively measurable parameters and to predict the level of seating comfort based on such a relation. No generally accepted approach exists, however. Models which take the time-dependent variation of parameter values into account are rare. Based on the analysis of typical driver behaviour in long-duration travel, the author identifies comfort-related movement patterns and describes an approach to determine the level of seating comfort. A new model is developed illustrating the genesis of long-term seating comfort and methods for its objective analysis.