Assessing Car Seat Posture through Comfort and User Experience

Abstract

The vehicular market is undergoing a profound transformation that includes a trend toward fully automated driving. When travelling in automated systems, the main task is no longer driving. Therefore, the interior design of automated vehicles requires a renovation to adapt to new use cases. With this motivation, the use case of sleeping while travelling was chosen for this user study, in which different seat configuration conditions were evaluated. The three preselected seat positions for this research included the upright, reclined and flat seat positions. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to examine the comfort of different seat angles in meeting the need to sleep in a moving vehicle. Since the physical experience of the occupants with a high-fidelity seat prototype is essential to evaluate the new interior concept of the vehicle of the future, in this study, the experimental participants were asked about their perception of comfort and overall user experience while travelling by car under close-to-real test conditions. Therefore, the primary objective of this evaluation was to explore different seat configurations and find the most suitable seat position for the use case of sleeping in a car while moving. Our findings suggest that users prefer reclining and flat seats in short-/medium- and long-term use cases, respectively.