A wearable low-cost device for measurement of human exposure to transmitted vibration on motorcycle

The comfort experienced driving a motorcycle is becoming a subject of great importance, indeed, the driver is exposed to vibrations, which in some cases may cause troublesome problems. The vibrations, during the driving of a motorcycles, are caused by irregular profiles of the road surface or by the wear of the latter; these conditions, unfortunately, are present in almost all the driving conditions, reason why each driver is exposed to it. The aim of the paper is to give the opportunity for the driver to know the exposure to the vibration during a ride using a low-cost wearable device (smart watch) considering the suggestion of the ISO 5349 for the calculation of the hand transmitted vibrations index. A suitable measurement system has been designed and tested on a real motorcycle in order to acquire in real-time the acceleration signals through a Bluetooth communication, which interface a wearable device with a microcontroller unit useful to calculate the hand transmitted vibrations index suggested by the ISO 5349 and store it into a data logger.