Engineering assessment in biomechanics and ergonomic adoptable for designer at early product design phase

Occupational health get more concern in recent years, turning the ergonomic and human factor issues an essential consideration in product design process. In a survey presented in [4], over 90% of designers and engineers recognized that they needed to consider ergonomics earlier in the development processes. However, most of the assessment is done by engineers since designers always encountered technical difficulties to run such assessment. In this paper, we present a method for designers to adopt the engineering assessment for biomechanics and ergonomics on human posture at early product design phase. The aim is to allow designers to easily perform the design evaluation with minimal intensive technical training. The proposed method is implemented in the experiments to evaluate a sample workplace design for desktop work. Human motion data is captured and then applied to a digital human model and passed to assessment software to realize the human posture and evaluated based on existing ergonomic assessment scheme Rapid Upper Limb Assessment (RULA)[24].