Evaluation of Driver Fatigue on Truck Seats

ISBN-13: 9783639166712 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 148 str.

Chris Boggs

Opis

This study conducted a series of road tests in the regular fleet operations of a freight shipping service to better understand the relationship between vehicle seat design and driver fatigue, improve two newly proposed objective methods for evaluating driver fatigue, and provide design guidelines for evaluating and improving vehicle seat characteristics in terms of driver fatigue.Based on these results, we find that air-inflated seat cushions have advantages in terms of subjective measures of comfort, support, and fatigue. We show that the objective measure aPcrms highlights characteristic differences between seat cushions, as the air-inflated seat cushion provides less area in high pressure regions, thus occluding less blood flow to tissue in the seated area. This characteristic difference between seat cushions is not highlighted by using previously existing objective measures. This suggests aPcrms is a useful measure and should be considered when evaluating the subjective quality of seat cushion designs under dynamic conditions, such as those existing in commercial truck driving.

O autorze

Chris Boggs is a researcher for the Virginia Institute for
Performance Engineering and Research (VIPER). His
work focuses on developing 8-post rig testing methods and
developing vehicle models for full-motion driving simulator
applications. He received his MS in 2004 and PhD in 2009
in Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech.