ABSTRACT
The measurement of maximum foot and hand maximum force is important not only for specifying force limit of industrial workers but also for evaluating a hand or foot control which requires high demand of force. Even for the controls requiring low force demand, maximum static strength can be used as an objective indicator for defining discomfort evaluation criteria. Although a large amount of data of muscle strength has been collected in the past, few can be directly used for today's automotive control design. Thus, according to today's car driving conditions, a specific experiment was therefore set up to collect maximum force that a driver can exert on three frequently used automotive controls: clutch pedal, gear lever and
hand brake. Another reason that motivated this experiment was the need to collect corresponding body postures so as to predict both maximum static strength and corresponding posture using a digital human model. This paper aims at presenting the data based approach developed for this purpose including data collecting protocol and data processing as well as methods for exploiting the collected data. The approach is illustrated using the hand brake as example.
