• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.243-249
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• 2009

In modern society, people spend most of their time on various types of chairs. However, it is not easy for a designer to design a comfortable chair because satisfaction with the chair depends not only on the quantitative elements such as size, but also on the qualitative element such as the user's feeling. To deal with these problems, there have been many studies on designing ergonomic chairs. This paper proposes the haptic-aided design (HAD) system to design an ergonomic chair. Based on the HAD system, the designer can experience whether the chair is comfortable or not through the haptic device, and also can modify the design parameters instantaneously. The haptic chair capable of controlling the design parameters in real time was proposed as a haptic simulator. The controllable parameters, such as seat height, reclining angle, stiffness of the backrest, and so on were selected based on the previous research related to ergonomic chairs. The proposed methodology will help reduce the development cost and time by replacing the process of making the real mock-ups and prototypes with the haptic chair.

• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
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• 2008.11a
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• pp.860-864
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• 2008

In modern society, people tend to spend their time on various types of chairs. However, it is not easy for a designer to design a comfortable chair, because satisfaction with the chair depends not only on the quantitative elements such as size, but also on the qualitative element such as the user's feeling. To deal with these problems, there have been many studies on designing an ergonomics chair. In this paper, the hapticaided design (HAD) system was adopted to design the ergonomics chair. Based on the HAD system, the designer can experience whether the chair is comfortable or not through the haptic device, and also can modify the design parameters instantaneously. The haptic chair capable of controlling the design parameters in real time was proposed as a haptic simulator. The controllable parameters such as the seat height, reclining angle, stiffness of the backrest, and so on were selected based on the previous researches related to ergonomics chairs. It will reduce the development cost and time by replacing the process of making the real mock-up and prototype with the haptic chair.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2009.06a
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• pp.285-286
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• 2009

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.34 no.5
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• pp.527-533
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• 2010

The feeling that is evoked when products are handled has become increasingly important in the design of products primarily used by humans. In the traditional product design process, prototypes are built several times in order to evaluate the feeling evoked during use. However, these design processes can be optimized by adopting a haptic simulator that can serve as a prototype. The design method based on the use of the haptic simulator is called haptics-aided design (HAD), which is the main subject of this paper. Here, a new HAD method that can be effectively used to design a custom-made chair is proposed. A haptic simulator, which is composed of a haptic chair and an intuitive graphical user interface, was developed. The simulator can adjust the impedance of the backrest and seat pan of a chair in real time. The haptic chair was used instead of real prototypes in order to evaluate the comfort of the initially designed seat pan and backrest on the basis of their stiffness and damping values. It was shown that the HAD method can be effectively used to design a custom-made chair and can be extended to other product design processes.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.20 no.8
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• pp.815-821
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• 2014

In this paper, we propose a novel CALL (Computer-Assisted Language Learning) system, which is called POMY (POSTECH Immersive English Study). In our system, students can study English while talking to characters in a computer-generated virtual environment. POMY also supports haptic feedback, so students can study English in a more interesting manner. Haptic feedback is provided by two platforms, a haptic chair and a force-feedback device. The haptic chair, which is equipped with an array of vibrotactile actuators, delivers directional information to the student. The force-feedback device enables the student to feel the physical properties of an object. These haptic systems help the student better understand English conversations and focus on studying. We conducted a user experiment and its results showed that our haptic-enabled English study contributes to better learning of English.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.34 no.11
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• pp.1581-1586
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• 2010

Haptic-aided design (HAD) involves the use of a haptic simulator in place of physical prototypes in the design and development of products with which human beings interact physically. The development time and cost can be significantly reduced by adopting this HAD scheme. Although both physical and emotional factors are equally important, only the emotional factors were taken into consideration in the previous HAD process. Consequently, the design of the products was sometimes unsatisfactory from the viewpoint of ergonomics, even though users were emotionally satisfied with the products. To overcome this problem, in this study, we propose a new human-oriented design methodology that is enhanced by taking the physical factors into consideration. The HAD scheme was verified by using a haptic chair simulator to design a tilt mechanism of an office chair for which the stiffness of the backrest can be adjusted; then, the design was simulated using MADYMO. The results show that the proposed method can reflect both the physical and emotional factors to modify the design in real-time.

• Korean Journal of Computational Design and Engineering
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.277-285
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• 2004

In this paper, a 2 DOF haptic yawing joystick for use as the navigation input device in virtual environments is introduced. The haptic yawing joystick has 360° range for yawing motion and ±100° for pitching motion. The device can support weights of up to 26N for χ axis and 10N for axis with 10kHz of sampling rate. The size of the haptic yawing joystick is so small that it can be assembled on armrest of an arm chair and has relatively larger work space than other conventional 2 DOF joysticks. For the haptic yawing joystick, an ellipse navigation algorithm using the user's velocity in the virtual navigation is proposed. The ellipse represents the velocity of the user. According to the velocity of the navigator, the ellipse size is supposed to be changed. Since the path width of navigation environments is limited, the ellipse size is also limited. The ellipse navigation algorithm is tested in 2 dimensional virtual environments. The test results show that the average velocity of the navigation with the algorithm is faster than the average navigation velocity without the algorithm.