Evaluation of personalized human body buttock-thigh finite element models in terms of soft tissue deformation for seat comfort assessment

Finite Element Models (FEM) of the human body (HBM) are used to analyze static seating discomfort mainly in terms of interface pressure distribution on the seat surface (Savonnet et al. 2018). However, most of the HBMs are not validated under actual seating conditions due to the difficulty in measuring internal body loads such as soft tissue deformation, intervertebral disc pressures, etc. The rare HBM related studies claiming validation have only analyzed the interface pressure distribution. Recent experiments conducted with and without foam for different seat pan inclinations (Fig 1b) using Open MRI indicate that soft tissue deformation below the Ischial Tuberosity (IT) is affected by both contact pressure and shear and thus could be an objective indicator in seat discomfort assessment (Wang et al. 2021). The aim of this present study is to report a preliminary evaluation of FE-HBMs against these subject-specific experimental data in terms of interface pressure and soft tissue deformation.