Analysis of Co-Relation Between Objective Measurement and Subjective Assessment for Dynamic Comfort of Vehicles

The assessment of vehicle dynamic comfort to human body vibration varies from person to person. Even though the dynamic comfort rating can be obtained by placing measurement devices over the cabin, passengers may have dissimilar sensations. For many car manufacturers, both subject and objective measurements are used together at development of new cars. To effectively assess the dynamic comfort of vehicle, this research explores the correlation between the objective measurement of the whole body vibration, hand-transmitted vibration and subjective assessment. The whole body vibration is measured from the backrest, seat surface and vehicle floor, whereas the hand-transmitted vibration is measured from the steering wheel. Four different vehicles are driven at various speeds on five types of pavements. Both simple linear regression and polynomial regression models based on Stevens’s power law from psychophysics are built to correlate the subjective and objective data. The regression results show that (1) the seat surface is more reliable than other positions for assessing the human body vibration; (2) the hand transmitted vibration on rough roads is more trustful for dynamic comfort evaluation than on smooth roads; (3) the overall dynamic comfort value is the most reliable index for dynamic comfort evaluation.