Digital human-in-the-loop framework

Although there are numerous ergonomics assessment methods available for assessing safety, comfort, and performance of human-product interactions, there is a lack of comprehensive and widely available computational human-centered design framework that brings human factors principles into engineering design. In existing human-centered design approaches, computational assessment of human-product interaction is not explicitly considered as part of the early design phase, but rather it is addressed downstream in the design process through traditional human factors engineering strategies, often, includes physical prototyping and usability studies with extensive human-subject data collection. We hypothesize that digital human modeling can be utilized not only as an ergonomics evaluation tool but also as an engineering design methodology to embrace form and function during the early phases of the development. The digital human modeling approach has the potential to be a merger between the form and functionality aspects of product design by focusing on human needs, abilities, and limitations. This paper introduces a novel human-in-the-loop methodology which injects human factors engineering principles via digital human modeling into a computational design environment to assess the safety and performance of human-product interactions early in design.