ABSTRACT
Comfort is one of the challenges that are critical to quality characteristics due to its subjective nature. The need for quantifiable seat comfort grew significantly as the emergent technologies introduced more sitting-centered activities. Nonstop airline trips and other prolonged sitting activities proved to cause health implications and may reduce the quality of the job performed. Designers find it hard to identify the customer's requirements for seat comfort due to the customer’s ambiguous perception of comfort requirements. Therefore, seat designers depend on physical prototypes to perform comfort evaluation. Weak problem definition for comfort design means that any alterations will be initiated in a new design cycle. This study suggests exposing the seat comfort characteristics to the customers via Quality Function Deployment (QFD) to be integrated into the design for seat comfort. The outcomes of the QFD will be conveyed into a Computer-Aided Design (CAD) technique that allows for swift comfort evaluation. The system employs tools for designing and predicting seat comfort by injecting the QFD outcomes into CAD. Validation of the study is carried out with laboratory testing that compares the system’s outcomes to the traditional seat comfort evaluation approaches. The results confirm that the system can enhance seat comfort design and provide a more efficient evaluation to replace the tedious and resource exploiting seat comfort analyses.
