수공구 손잡이 형태에 따른 청.노년층의 악력과 손가락 힘 및 편안함 분석

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to evaluate aging (young and old), gender (male and female), and handle shape effects on grip force, finger force, and subjective comfort. Four handle shapes of A, D, I, and V were implemented by a multi-finger force measurement (MFFM) system which was developed to measure every finger force with different grip spans. Forty young (20 males and 20 females) and forty old (20 males and 20 females) subjects participated in twelve gripping tasks and rated their comfort for all handles using a 5-point scale. Grip forces were calculating by summation of all four forces of the index, middle, ring and little fingers. Results showed that young males (283.2N) had larger gripping force than old males (235.6N), while young females (151.4N) had lower force than old females (153.6N). Young subjects exerted the largest gripping force with D-shape due to large contribution of the index and middle fingers and the smallest with A-shape; however, old subjects exerted the largest with I-shape and the smallest with V-shape due to small contribution of the ring and little fingers. As expected, the middle finger had the largest finger force and the little finger had the smallest. The fraction of contribution of index and ring fingers to grip force differed among age groups. Interestingly, young subjects provided larger index finger force than ring finger force, whereas old subjects showed that larger ring finger forces than index finger force in the griping tasks. In the relationship between performance and subjective comfort, I-shape exerting the largest grip force had less comfort than D-shape producing the second largest grip force. The findings of this study can provide guidelines on designing hand tool handle to obtain better performance as well as users` comfort.