Providing Optimal Parameters for Car Seats (Pride) to Reduce Damage of the Knee Joint

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran

2 PHD student, Faculty of Engineering, Islamic Azad University Central Tehran, Tehran, Iran

3 Master student, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Isfahan University of Technology, Isfahan, Iran

4 Associate Professor, rehabilitation faculty of Isfahan, University of Medical Science, Isfahan,Iran

Abstract

Purpose:
Due to the continuous use of pedal in duration of driving time, high external pressure in different knee flexion and extension angles on drivers’ knee joint may be applied. These injuries include low back pain and knee pain. The comfortable and sufficiently spacious car sit, may influence the low back pain and knee pain associated by design and type of car seat.
Methods:
In this study, various tests were conducted on four drivers, contact force between the pedals and driver’ foot is measured by installing sensors on the clutch and brake pedal. The kinematic data is recorded by high-speed camera during pedaling. These data is used as inputs and the moment of knee joint while pedaling is obtained as outputs in the mathematical model attained by MATLAB SimMechanics software. The optimal seating positions is obtained by changing the parameters of the seat through coding and extracting the lowest torque put on knee joint.
Results:
Using the pedal mechanism and optimization of chair parameters, this result shows that the height of Pride seat and the horizontal distance between the heel and the seat is shifted to 6cm and 9cm, respectively. Moreover, reducing the maximum internal knee-extension moment by around 10 to 15 percent.
Conclusion:
Considering that pride seat can be moved to the front and rear position means that the horizontal distance between pedals and seat is changed. To improve driving of this vehicle, we can add a lever which is moveable seat height to 6 cm. This method have many advantage: Simply stated model, high-speed computing and the future of computing by a coefficient of spring and damper maybe applied to the muscles.

 

Keywords

References

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Journal of Paramedical Sciences & Rehabilitation
Volume 5, Issue 3
October 2016
Pages 64-73

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