ABSTRACT
Industrial production generally seeks to meet the demands of a wide and heterogeny clientele as precisely as possible. Hence, as user profiles change, the design of industrial products changes as well. To ensure good interaction between man and machine, technical aids generally should reflect major characteristics of envisaged user populations (e.g., demographic profiles as described by age and gender). That kind of target group orientation not only addresses classical anthropometries but also influences manipulation forces and may directly affect health protection.
The general problem is how to protect different user populations by the same safety level—in other words, how to make sure that all user groups are really taking comparable risks. The European Union (EU) is defining safe products by CEN standardization. Some of these CEN safety limits largely depend on the profile of the intended target population—so do force limits. That is why EN 1005/3 introduced force limits reflecting demographic profiles. These characteristics are given by distributions of age and gender. Such an evaluation procedure is new in the field of load rating. Traditional approaches either refer to pure male or pure female populations or to a fixed mix of both (e.g., NIOSH, 1981; Siemens, 1969). It is an outstanding characteristic of EN 1005/3 that its special load limits react directly to the slightest changes in demographic profiles.
