A preliminary study on the realism of digital human manikins used for ergonomics simulation

39ème Congrès de la Société de Biomécanique, VALENCIENNES, FRANCE, 27-/08/2014 - 29/08/2014Digital human models (DHM) are used for ergonomics assessment of a product or a workplace in its early phase of development. Differently sized manikins are simulated to provide designs that accommodate with a large range of a target population (Chaffin 2005 ). They are also used in ergonomics research for posture/movement analysis, and personalised manikins should be defined. The geometric model of a DHM consists of two distinguished parts: an external body shape and an internal articulated linkage representing the skeleton. To build a subject-specific manikin, a set of anthropometric measurements are first collected from a volunteer under study. The manikin's external shape and internal linkage are estimated as a function of these external inputs. For instance, Human Builder, one of the most widely used DHMs, requires up to 70 anthropometric measurements such as stature, sitting height, and weight for creating a manikin. In practice, not all required anthropometric measures are available. The missing parameters necessary for manikin generation are automatically estimated from a chosen anthropometric database. A similar module can be found in RAMSIS, another DHM widely used in automotive packaging. However, few studies have been published for verifying the realism of these personalised manikins, in particular their internal skeleton linkage (Zhang et al. 2004 ). Thanks to recent advances in medical imaging, data of both external body shape and internal skeleton are becoming available. Therefore, this study aimed to verify how good these personalised manikins are, especially in terms of the joint locatio