Objectifying discomfort seat measurement for next generation truck driver's seat

Comfort is an attribute that today’s drivers demand more and more. Seat is one of the important features of vehicle and there is the place where the professional driver spends most of their time. According to ‘European Union Legislation for Drivers and Promote’, the weekly driving time for truck drivers shall not exceed 56 hours. Assuming eight week vacation and one more for holiday, the truck driver is spending around 2408 hours driving time per year. Truck seat, which are in contact with truck occupants, play an important role in improving the comfort and work environment of a driver. The perceived comfort of humans in a given environment can be classified as a subjective assessment, because it is possible to find a considerable variation in responses of different people to the same situation. Nevertheless, the factors on which the opinions of people on (dis)comfort level are physical variables such as pressure, temperature and heart rate. The main research objective is to investigate "How to improve the truck seat comfort objectively?" The paper describes the state-of-the-art objective measurement techniques in seat development and an intelligent system is proposed for the next generation truck driver’s seat.