Design of backrest and seat pan of chairs on the basis of haptics-aided design method

The feeling that is evoked when products are handled has become increasingly important in the design of products primarily used by humans. In the traditional product design process, prototypes are built several times in order to evaluate the feeling evoked during use. However, these design processes can be optimized by adopting a haptic simulator that can serve as a prototype. The design method based on the use of the haptic simulator is called haptics-aided design (HAD), which is the main subject of this paper. Here, a new HAD method that can be effectively used to design a custom-made chair is proposed A haptic simulator, which is composed of a haptic chair and an intuitive graphical user interface, was developed. The simulator can adjust the impedance of the backrest and seat pan of a chair in real time. The haptic chair was used instead of real prototypes in order to evaluate the comfort of the initially designed seat pan and backrest on the basis of their stiffness and damping values. It was shown that the HAD method can be effectively used to design a custom-made chair and can be extended to other product design processes.