Body Shape Models for Seat Design

I gave a brief presentation to auto industry colleagues at a meeting of the semi-annual Seat Comfort Tech Club. This informal group of researchers and engineers from suppliers, OEMs, and a few of us academics get together to talk about methods, tools, and the occasional positive outcome in the quest to make automotive seats that aren't as bad as usual. Having been involved in automotive seating for my entire career, I know that as a community we forget just slightly less than we learn, so that the industry keeps making the same mistakes over and over, like designing seat backs that are just wide enough to fit the H-point machine, or putting bolstering adjacent to the hips. But it was great to see friends from way back and to show them the substantial progress we've made in the last 18 months. We've completely redone our automotive-posture body shape model, using our new high-res template and new fitting methods developed by my colleague Dr. Daniel Park. The model incorporates our lastest posture prediction so that accurate shapes and postures can be generated for any adult occupant in any passenger car/light truck seating scenario. The model, now based on over 500 people, is available at HumanShape.app/