DHERGO · Digital Humans for Ergonomic design of products

Ergonomic evaluation of a product requires building up a physical mock-up or a prototype, having a group of experts or a representative sample of users to test it and to give their discomfort feeling. This is an expensive and time-consuming process. Digital Mock-Ups together with Digital Human Models, are more and more used in the early phase of product design for reducing the product development time and cost. In order to help the designer to evaluate the future product, the digital human should ideally behave like human beings, not only in terms of anthropometry but also in terms of motion, discomfort perception and work related tissue injury. So the main objective of the project is to develop more advanced digital humans for ergonomic design of products (DHErgo), which are capable of: 1) Evaluating the discomfort based on advanced musculoskeletal models of the human body, 2) Simulating a population behaviour especially including age effects, 3) Simulating the interaction of the human body with the task-related environment, 4) Proposing design variants even for applications subjected to restricted resources and 5) Demonstration of productive usage. To achieve this objective, the project will mainly develop a generic biomechanical human model for modelling motion induced discomfort. As motion is generated by the contraction of muscles, only kinematic parameters can not explain perceived discomfort. Dynamic and muscular parameters must also be investigated. The development of such a generic dynamic human musculoskeletal model will rely on existing data and computerized human models. A European consortium composed of complementary expertises is the only way to collect data and to validate models for industrial applications. Automotive industry is one of most active end-users of digital human simulation tool, because of high pressure for reducing time-to-market and cost. The final results of the project will be demonstrated through case studies related to car design.