A numerical tool to simulate the kinematics of the ingress movement in variably-dimensioned vehicles for elderly and/or persons with prosthesis

This paper presents a method for simulating the kinematics of the vehicle ingress movement of elderly people and/or people with prostheses (represented by a humanoid mannequin with a head, trunk, pelvis and lower limbs) in variably-dimensioned vehicles, starting from real experimental data. To solve this “complex” problem, we propose a three-stage method. The first stage concerns the construction of an “exploitable” movement database, containing movements resulting from the numerical processing of the ingress movements measured in experiments carried out on two vehicles with 2 distinct geometries. The second stage, consisting of 4 phases, analyzes and automatically identifies the ingress movement strategies. By the end of this stage, 2 ingress strategies and 6 sub strategies were identified. The third stage is the simulation. It uses the results from stages 1 and 2 to simulate the ingress movement of a subject in the database, adopting a given sub-strategy for a vehicle with a different geometry. The simulation of the ingress movement of the same subject but for another vehicle is formulated as an inverse kinematics problem, which is solved by constrained nonlinear programming.