A Classification of Drivers’ Sitting Strategy based on Seating Pressure

As driver’s body pressure distribution has been considered in ergonomic car seat design, several researches about pressure distribution based sitting strategy classification have been conducted. However, the seating strategies extracted by the existing studies have been visually classified based on body pressure distribution graph. The present study measured 40 Korean drivers" (20 male, 20 female) body pressure in their preferred sitting posture, and quantitatively classified drivers’ sitting strategy using body pressure ratio (BPR) and cluster analysis. This study measured the body pressure of seventeen body parts (9 upper body parts, 8 lower body parts) separately by utilizing a seating buck which can be converted into three different types (coupe, sedan, and SUV) of occupational package layout (OPL). The measured body pressure has been classified into five sitting strategies (mid-back & scapular, hip; mid-back & scapular, hip & mid-thigh; mid-back & lumbar, hip; mid-back & lumbar, hip & mid-thigh; lumbar, hip & mid-thigh) by independence test between upper body and lower body sitting strategies, and cluster analysis of whole strategies. Moreover, this study developed a sitting strategy classification system based on five classified sitting strategies. The sitting strategies classified in this study can be utilized in ergonomic evaluation of vehicle seat design.