Chapter 75: DHM for Ergonomical Assessment of Home Appliances

The ergonomic evaluation of the human-product interaction is still an open issue in Physical Ergonomics. The Proactive Ergonomic paradigm requires the introduction of new methods and indexes for the virtual comfort rating of motion, simulating the daily practice. Recently a new Index, Method for Movement and Gesture Assessment (MMGA), has been proposed by the authors for studying both ergonomic occupational effort and perception while performing dynamic tasks, and a theoretical assessment has been presented for the construction of reaching comfort maps .
The aim of this work is to evaluate the accuracy of the MMGA Index, comparing the score of different users while executing practical tasks interacting with three different commercial products. Traditional Ergonomics Indexes are defined mostly for a postural static evaluation of human motion and the new Index evaluates the kinematics of the entire task refining the measure. The MMGA has been tested evaluating human motion data acquired with an optoelectronic system.
The MMGA is in this work tested to point out significant differences among the different products and to be proposed as a relevant method for design practice in physical ergonomics.