Digital Human Modeling. Applications in Health, Safety, Ergonomics, and Risk Management

One of the challenges that human-centered product designers face while generating and validating a design concept is the dilemma of whether to build a full physical prototype, a full computational simulation or a combination of both. A full physical prototype can assist designers to evaluate the humanproduct interactions with high-fidelity, but it requires additional time and resources when compared to a computational prototype, which is a cheaper option but provides low-fidelity. Human-product interactions often require complex motions and postures, and the interaction can vary due to multiple reasons such as individual differences, routine and emergency procedures, environmental conditions etc. In this paper, reach postures of a pilot during a routine and an emergency procedure are evaluated through a full computational and a mixed prototype. It is found that pilot’s reaching strategy, based on the joint angles, during the emergency procedure is different than that of the routine procedure for the same reaching posture. It is also found that the full computational prototype that utilizes the empirical whole-body posture prediction has limitations in reflecting the individual variations in reaching strategies during the emergency procedure. However, the mixed prototype can simulate the emergency procedure and can capture the difference of reaching posture that occurs during an emer‐ gency event.