Passive muscle force analysis during vehicle access: a gender comparison

Ensuring customer satisfaction within the automotive industry is a top priority. Primary concerns of satisfaction revolve around perceived comfort of entering and exiting vehicles. The ease of this task is attributed mostly to the design of the vehicles door frame however these are not tailored towards a specific gender. In this paper we present a biomechanical analysis-based gender assessment during entering and exiting a vehicle. The proposed method of analysis provides an assessment that can be used to predict differences between genders. The trials conducted in this study used ten subjects entering a common family vehicle. The discomfort measure based on the normalised muscle forces relies on biomechanical analysis of posture sequences entering and exiting the vehicles.