Rigid Material on Top of a Compliant Flooring Effectively Reduces the Impact Force In The Event of a Forward Fall

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that adding a rigid layer on top of compliant flooring significantly reduces impact forces during forward falls, potentially preventing wrist fractures in human-robot collaboration environments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel double-layer flooring design combining rigid and compliant materials to effectively reduce impact forces in fall scenarios.

Findings

Impact force peaks are reduced with double-layer flooring.

First impact peak magnitude decreases with rigid layer addition.

Second impact peak remains unchanged.

Abstract

The biomechanical studies have proposed several forward fall arresting strategies to reduce the impact forces in a human-robot collaboration environment. A proposed strategy is using a compliant flooring for an environment because it can reduce the stiffness of the ground. In this study, we proposed that if a rigid layer is mounted on a compliant flooring (double-layer flooring), the impact force is further reduced. In order to investigate this goal, we designed two subjective laboratory experiments. In experiment 1, the subjects were instructed falling to the ground where was covered by a single layer of compliant material (a foam pad). In experiment 2, the subjects fell on double-layer flooring when one rigid layer (a wood surface) was mounted on the compliant layer. The impact forces were measured for two short forward fall heights onto the outstretched hand. The results showed that the profile of the impact forces consists of two peaks. The first peak has a higher magnitude, and it is followed by the second peak with a lower magnitude. Comparing the magnitude of the first peak between two experiments shows a reduction of the impact force in experiment 2. In contrast, the magnitudes of second peaks are identical for both experiments. Therefore, we concluded that using a double-layer flooring, i.e.one rigid layer and one compliant layer can be an effective strategy for considerably reducing the impact force, and preventing the wrist fractures during the forward fall.