Status of Digital Human Body Modeling From the Aspect of Information Inclusion

Abstract

This paper surveys the current state of art of digital human body modeling with a focus on information inclusion and analyzes the results from the aspects of design and engineering. It presents the results of a literature study, which intended to investigate the modeling approaches within the mentioned categories, and to investigate the fidelity of models based on the information content. In view of the fact that modeling is always a simplified representation of reality, models with different information contents are developed for different applications. It is also discussed in this paper that the information content of human body models however reflects not only the aspect of application, but also the level of fidelity, or functional sophistication. Taking into consideration the sorts of information needed to model human body as a complex organic system, the authors propose an information content-based categorization. The major categories of aspect models of human body that have been incorporated in a stratified reasoning scheme are: morphological, material, structural, mechanical, physiological and behavioral models. One conclusion is that remarkable progress has been achieved in terms of sophistication of models (i.e., of information inclusion and processing methods). Another conclusion is that further increase of the fidelity of models will not be possible without the proper treatment of the concomitant complexities. Integration of various aspect models and real time computational processing of human models are inevitable in several fields of application. However, development of human body models of such a high sophistication goes together with an exponential growth in the required capacities. This leads us to a trade-off problem in digital human body modeling.