ERGOBOSS: Ergonomic Optimization of Body-Supporting Surfaces

Area of Science:

• Biomechanics
• Computational mechanics
• Ergonomics

Background:

• Designing comfortable and ergonomic supporting surfaces is crucial for human interaction.
• Existing methods for ergonomic shape design often lack computational efficiency and physical realism.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a method for designing rigid supporting surfaces that maximize the ergonomics of physical contact with a deformable human model.
• To create a computationally efficient and differentiable contact model for gradient-based optimization.

Main Methods:

• Modeling the human body as a deformable tissue layer around a rigid core using finite element method (FEM) with realistic material properties.
• Defining a novel cost function to quantify contact ergonomics.
• Implementing a stable, differentiable contact model for gradient-based optimization of surface geometry.

Main Results:

• The developed optimization method produced superior supporting surface designs compared to prior work.
• Validated through examples including furniture, apparel, and tools.
• Optimized shoe sole design demonstrated improved ergonomic contact, matching simulation predictions with 3D-printed prototypes and pressure sensor data.

Conclusions:

• The proposed method offers a robust and efficient approach to designing ergonomic surfaces.
• The technique has broad applicability across various products requiring comfortable human-surface interaction.
• Computational modeling and simulation provide accurate predictions for real-world ergonomic design challenges.