ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates through a simulation study of a human model how the energy transferred in response to vibration is minimized. The equations of motion for a continuously distributed human body model and a lumped-mass human body model are presented. In the modeling of human body vibration, body segment responses could be minimized by optimizing the coefficients of spring and damping forces at the contact level, and a method by which the effects of vibration on the human body could be minimized by optimizing damping and stiffness coefficients at the contact level is developed. Numerical simulations show that the method presented is very effective in the analysis of vertical vibration, and it could be extended to handle other motions. The external force (or displacement) could be any function describing the environmental stimulus and can be used to minimize human body vibration by finding optimum damping and stiffness coefficients.
