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3.1 INTRODUCTION
In the previous chapter, a literature review and four surveys were conducted to
establish the knowledge of seating comfort and discomfort, the measurement
methods on seating discomfort, aircraft seats and which body part of economy
class aircraft passengers is most suitable for the development of a smart system.
The literature review showed that seating comfort and discomfort is subjective
and interchangeable. Objective measurements and subjective measurements can
be used to measure and understand seating comfort and discomfort. The current
economy class aircraft seat is a passive system where the passenger needs to do
the adjustment manually. The survey on seating comfort and discomfort was
designed to understand the seating comfort descriptor, truck driver’s body
discomfort over travel time, economy class aircraft passenger’s body discomfort
over travel time and the relationship between sitting posture and sitting location.
The survey results indicate that the neck is one of the most discomfort body parts
after one hour and after five hours travel for truck drivers as well as economy
class aircraft passengers. In the survey, we also found that neck support is one of
the top ranking comfort descriptors for economy class aircraft seat. The
observation in the economy class aircraft cabin also indicates that most observed
passengers preferred sitting posture with head facing forward. The head facing
forward is the most comfortable head position Tilley and Dreyfuss, 2002.
Therefore, the author develops a smart system prototype that focuses on neck
support. The objective of a smart system is to reduce the neck muscle stress of
the economy class passengers during air travel. This chapter
1
describes the
1
This chapter is partly based on the following articles: Tan,
C.F., Chen, W., Kimman, F. and Rauterberg, M. 2009. Sleeping posture analysis of economy class
aircraft seat. World Congress on Engineering 2009, London, UK, pp. 532‐535. Tan,
C.F. Chen, W. and Rauterberg, M. 2009. Development of adaptive aircraft passenger seat system
for comfort improvement. Proceedings of International Conference for Technical Postgraduates,
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, paper no. CC02‐05. Tan,
C.F. Chen, W., Hao Liu and Rauterberg, M. 2009. Adaptive framework and user preference modeling
for economy class aircraft passenger seat. 2009 Third UKSim European Symposium on Computer
Modeling and Simulation, Greece, Athens, pp. 66‐69.
59 development
of a smart neck support system SnS
2
for passenger seat. The SnS
2
is a working and functional prototype that is able to support the passenger’s neck
in an adaptive and autonomous way. Commercial product design method e.g.
total design is used for the development of SnS
2
.
3.2 EXISTING NECK SUPPORT DURING TRAVEL
Kategori