Driving simulators have been developed for evaluating users' reaction to various driving situations. Dynamic simulators have, however, limitations of the motion feedback in space. Therefore, this paper presents a driving simulator and suggests a human sensibility ergonomics (kansei engineering) method to be used in improving sense of motion through a vehicle simulator. Human sensibility ergonomics(kansei engineering) is defined as translating technology of the customer' feeling about a new product into design elements. Constituents of the simulator were defined and the virtual world was generated by the object modeling technique. Senses perceived were classified into feelings of velocity, acceleration, rotation, and vibration based on the human sensibility associated with driving. And the most frequent verbal expressions were collected from 17 male subjects to define complex human sensibility.

The aim was to evaluate the prevailing ergonomic and psychosocial conditions regarding low back injury in an automobile assembly system. This study consisted of two parts. In the first part of the study, analytic biomechanical model and NIOSH guidelines were applied to evaluate risk levels of low back injury for automobile assembly jobs. Total of 246 workers were analysed. There were 20 jobs having greater back compressive forces than 300kg at L5/S1. Also, there were 44 jobs over Action Limit with respect to 1981 NIOSH guidelines. This might in part be explained by the ergonomic conditions of the company analysed generally being good, with a relatively low duration of 'combined' extreme work posture. The relationship between psychosocial factors and low back injury was examined in the second part of the study. It has recently been recognized that overall reaction to working conditions was influenced by a range of factors, some of which were physical and some psychosocial. The psychosocial environment surrounding the work place may contribute to the perception of risk and eventual ill-health. A battery of questionnaires concerning the psychosocial stress based on PWI(Psychosocial Well-being Index) and musculoskeletal pain symptoms at low back was completed by 246 workers at the same plant. Results showed that 207 out 246 workers experienced the symptoms and 27 workers were diagnosed as patients. Two groups(low stressed, high stressed) based on PWI score had no significant relationships with both symptoms and results of diagnosis. However, sensitivities for symptoms and diagnosis by PWI were 91.3% and 92.6% respectively. Finally, relationships between physical work load and psychosocial stress were analysed. Specifically, some postural factors {vertical deviation angle of forearm, horizontal deviation angle of upperarm, vertical deviation angle of thigh, etc) were highly correlated with psychosocial stress. The results illustrated that PWI scores were associated with some physical workloads. However, psychosocial stress levels couldn't be well related with the pain symptom as well as the actual incidence of low back injury since pain or discomfort regarding low back injury were more complex than that of other musculoskeletal disorders.

Present study was performed to compare different types of teleoperation performance measures. A modified Cooper-Harper rating scale and a distance measure were newly introduced and compared to two traditional measures, the error rate and time-to-completion. Participants performed a simulated telerobotic task with varying visual display interfaces. The results of correlation analyses revealed that the modified Cooper-Harper ratings had a close association with the error rate measure. The distance measure also appeared to be a consistent performance measure, which accounted for both the error rate and time-to-completion. A further analysis, however, showed that the effectiveness of each performance measure varied with the level of task difficulty. The results imply that the choice of performance measure should be made based on the task difficulty as well as the particular task being studied. The results revealed here also have implication for performance measures of various display and control systems including aircraft navigation displays and tactical displays.

To study the characteristic of the weight center control of humans, the tracking control capability of circular and wave motion by weight center movement was conducted by using the force platform. The control performance(the integrated value of the $|Object\;value(X)-Control\;Value(Y)|^{2}$) and control trace record was used to evaluate the individual performance characteristics. The size of the population for this study was 73, which consisted of engineering students, students majoring in taekwondo, students majoring in dance, all of which were in their twenties, and also people in their sixties. The results of this study indicate that the weight center control characteristics of humans can be represented by the evaluation method and values. People who were capable of tracking the object did not stop nor overshot the objective. In addition, habits or training characteristics and aging seemed to influence the performance of the subjects. In the future, development of different objectives for weight center control could be used to determine the severity of the disease of the subject and the effects of the treatment.

This paper is to clarify a thermal physiological index that can account for the effects of local thermal environment. For this purpose two young female subjects exposing themselves to the above while sitting on a chair, sitting on the floor and lying on the floor were measured. These three representative postures accompanied the different contact surface areas, thereby the heat conduction rate between the floor and subject was quantitatively measured for each posture. It made the present study deal with the effect of heat conduction concerning the modified mean skin temperature and finally propose new weighting coefficients for the mean skin temperature calculation based on the Hardy & DuBois' formulas. In order to verify the proposed model, the experiment was carried out using a floor heating system. The comparison between the experimental result and prediction revealed that the proposed model should be about 10% more accurate than the conventional one in the case of lying on the floor which the heat conduction effect becomes important.

In this study, the characteristics of transmitted vibration on HAS(hand-arm system) were identified to evaluate physical load due to the work surface orientation, tool weight and push force during powered drilling tasks. The characteristics of transmitted vibration on work surface orientation showed that the acceleration of transmitted vibration on horizontal work surface was higher than that on the vertical work surface. Regarding the characteristics of transmitted vibration on tool weight, the vibration acceleration level becomes lower as the tool weight becomes heavier. The amount of transmitted vibration on hand-arm system was decreased down to the tool weight of 2.4kg. However, as the tool weight becomes heavier than 2.8kg, the amount of transmitted vibration was increased and had peak value at 3.2kg of tool weight. Regarding the characteristics of transmitted vibration on push force, the vibration acceleration level goes higher, as the push force becomes larger. The characteristics of transmitted vibration on the axis of vibration showed that the direction of $Z_h$ had the highest acceleration compared to the direction of $X_h$, and $Y_h$. The direction of $X_h$, $Y_h$ and $Z_h$ had the highest acceleration of transmitted vibration on the hand, wrist and elbow, respectively. The results of this study showed that the condition which affect the lowest physical load to the subject on the powered drilling task would be working with the 2.4kg of tool weight on the vertical work surface.

This study aims to examine a fuzzy logic-based human expert EMG prediction model (FLHEPM) for predicting electromyographic responses of trunk muscles due to manual lifting based on two task (control) variables. The FLHEPM utilizes two variables as inputs and ten muscle activities as outputs. As the results, the lifting task variables could be represented with the fuzzy membership functions. This provides flexibility to combine different scales of model variables in order to design the EMG prediction system. In model development, it was possible to generate the initial fuzzy rules using the neural network, but not all the rules were appropriate (87% correct ratio). With regard to the model precision, the EMG signals could be predicted with reasonable accuracy that the model shows mean absolute error of 8.43% ranging from 4.97% to 13.16% and mean absolute difference of 6.4% ranging from 2.88% to 11.59%. However, the model prediction accuracy is limited by use of only two task variables which were available for this study (out of five proposed task variables). Ultimately, the neuro-fuzzy approach utilizing all five variables to predict either the EMG activities or the spinal loading due to dynamic lifting tasks should be developed.