Predicting subjective responses from human motion: Application to vehicle ingress assessment

The ease of entering a car is one of the important ergonomic factors that car manufacturers consider during the process of car design. This has motivated many researchers to investigate factors that affect discomfort during ingress. The patterns of motion during ingress may be related to discomfort, but the analysis of motion is challenging. In this paper, a modeling framework is proposed to use the motions of body landmarks to predict subjectively reported discomfort during ingress. Foot trajectories are used to identify a set of trials with a consistent right-leg-first strategy. The trajectories from 20 landmarks on the limbs and torso are parameterized using B-spline basis functions. Two group selection methods, group non-negative garrote (GNNG) and stepwise group selection (SGS), are used to filter and identify the trajectories that are important for prediction. Finally, a classification and prediction model is built using support vector machine (SVM). The performance of the proposed framework is then evaluated against simpler, more common prediction models.