Digital Human Modeling to Predict Passenger Comfort: A Case of Indonesian Angkot

Abstract

This paper presents an evaluation of angkot, which was conducted to address ergonomic issues related to this mode of transport and to support the development of design recommendations for angkot use by the Indonesian population. This was achieved by carefully investigating the way people sit inside the angkot, modeling and running simulation to assess comfort, and finally proposing a design recommendation that is likely to be more ergonomic and healthy based on the simulation. A contextual inquiry method using video observation was applied to investigate sitting postures that appear most often among passengers. The analysis revealed that the most common sitting postures were sitting fairly upright, with the head facing down to the floor or facing front to the direction of travel; meanwhile, both arms were supported, and both legs were free on the floor. JACK Digital Human Modelling (DHM) software was used to perform Rapid Upper-Limb Assessment (RULA) analysis, which revealed a number of commonly adopted postures that require correction. A new seating layout is proposed based on the analysis and best practices from literature. RULA analysis was reapplied to the design changes to check the anticipated postures that would emerge i.e. passengers are facing towards the front of the bus, which is more likely to be ergonomically better for their comfort and health. This paper also discussed its limitations and potential future works. Future study of similar phenomena is still wide-open to obtain a more thorough comprehension of angkot microbus.