Prediction of Perceived Steering Wheel Operation Force by Muscle Activity

IEEE Trans Haptics. 2018 Oct-Dec;11(4):590-598. doi: 10.1109/TOH.2018.2828425. Epub 2018 Apr 19.

Abstract

Humans feel forces or weights while grasping and manipulating an object. There is a difference between the physical and perceived forces because the physical characteristics of an object and/or human psychophysical characteristics affect perceived force. Sense of effort plays an important role in deciding the movement made by humans. In this study, we propose a computational method to predict the perceived force by evaluating the muscle activity as a function of effort in the operation of a steering wheel based on a 3D-musculoskeletal model simulation. We found that the perceived-force characteristics depend on the driving posture, though the applied force is the same. We evaluated the results, and showed that the mean of the absolute error is 1.78 N for the experiments conducted on four different vehicles in commercially available.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Automobile Driving*
  • Biomechanical Phenomena / physiology*
  • Ergonomics / methods*
  • Humans
  • Muscle, Skeletal / physiology*
  • Posture / physiology*
  • Psychophysics / methods*
  • Touch Perception / physiology*