Psychophysical cost function of joint movement for arm reach posture prediction

A man model can be used as an effective tool to design ergonomically sound products and workplaces, and subsequently evaluate them properly. For a man model to be truly useful, it must be integrated with a posture prediction model which should be capable of representing the human arm reach posture in the context of equipments and workspaces. Since the human movement possesses redundant degrees of freedom, accurate representation or prediction of human movement was known to be a difficult problem. To solve this redundancy problem, a psychophysical cost function was suggested in this study which defines a cost value for each joint movement angle. The psychophysical cost function developed integrates the psychophysical discomfort of joints and the joint range availability concept which has been used for redundant arm manipulation in robotics to predict the arm reach posture. To properly predict an arm reach posture, an arm reach posture prediction model was then developed in which a posture configuration that provides the minimum total cost is chosen. The predictivity of the psychophysical cost function was compared with that of the biomechanical cost function which is based on the minimization of joint torque. Here, the human body is regarded as a two-dimensional multi-link system which consists of four links ; trunk, upper arm, lower arm and hand. Real reach postures were photographed from the subjects and were compared to the postures predicted by the model. Results showed that the postures predicted by the psychophysical cost function closely simulated human reach postures and the predictivity was more accurate than that by the biomechanical cost function.