Integrating digital human modeling into virtual environment for ergonomic oriented design

TL;DR

This paper presents a method that integrates virtual human modeling with virtual reality to evaluate physical fatigue and ergonomic risks, helping prevent musculoskeletal disorders without costly physical mock-ups.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integration of virtual human simulation with VR for ergonomic assessment, including fatigue analysis based on physical task parameters.

Findings

Effective virtual fatigue evaluation demonstrated in case study

Potential for improved ergonomic design and worker selection

Reduction in need for physical mock-up evaluations

Abstract

Virtual human simulation integrated into virtual reality applications is mainly used for virtual representation of the user in virtual environment or for interactions between the user and the virtual avatar for cognitive tasks. In this paper, in order to prevent musculoskeletal disorders, the integration of virtual human simulation and VR application is presented to facilitate physical ergonomic evaluation, especially for physical fatigue evaluation of a given population. Immersive working environments are created to avoid expensive physical mock-up in conventional evaluation methods. Peripheral motion capture systems are used to capture natural movements and then to simulate the physical operations in virtual human simulation. Physical aspects of human's movement are then analyzed to determine the effort level of each key joint using inverse kinematics. The physical fatigue level of each joint is further analyzed by integrating a fatigue and recovery model on the basis of physical task parameters. All the process has been realized based on VRHIT platform and a case study is presented to demonstrate the function of the physical fatigue for a given population and its usefulness for worker selection.