Computer Aided Design in Digital Human Modeling for Human Computer Interaction in Ergonomic Assessment: A Review

Research in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has been enormously successful in the area of computeraided ergonomics or human-centric designs. Perfect fit for people has always been a target for product design. Designers traditionally used anthropometric dimensions for 3D product design which created a lot of fitting problems when dealing with the complexities of the human body shapes. Computer aided design (CAD), also known as Computer aided design and drafting (CADD) is the computer technology used for the design processing and design documentation. CAD has now been used extensively in many applications such as automotive, shipbuilding, aerospace industries, architectural and industrial designs, prosthetics, computer animation for special effects in movies, advertising and technical manuals. As a technology, digital human modeling (DHM) has rapidly emerged as a technology that creates, manipulates and control human representations and human-machine systems scenes on computers for interactive ergonomic design problem solving. DHM promises to profoundly change how products or systems are designed, how ergonomics analysis is performed, how disorders and impairments are assessed and how therapies and surgeries are conducted. The imperative and emerging need for the DHM appears to be consistent with the fact that the past decade has witnessed significant growth in both the software systems offering DHM capabilities as well as the corporate adapting the technology.The authors shall dwell at length and deliberate on how research in DHM has finally brought about an enhanced HCI, in the context of computer-aided ergonomics or humancentric design and discuss about future trends in this context.