Monday, March 31, 2008

Stressing Out Your Body With Bad Computer Monitor Placement

The Detroit News says that Ford Motor Co. is taking special efforts to put computer monitors and consoles in just the right place.

Not as much strain, stress and irritation that way.

Everyone else in the room sees a man wearing an elaborate headpiece and a harness studded with reflective balls moving inside a metal rig that vaguely resembles the outline of a car. Infrared cameras track his movements and feed the images into a powerful computer system. The computer monitors the position of every body part and displays how much stress each movement is putting on every joint and vertebrae.

It is the same technology that Hollywood used to make Gollum come to life in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Ford is using it to study the way workers assemble cars and trucks on the line and identify potential ergonomic problems while the vehicle is still being designed.

The cutting-edge approach to vehicle design has drastically reduced the amount of time it takes to design a new vehicle, cut development costs and helped Ford improve quality. And other automakers, including arch-rival Toyota Motor Corp., are taking notice. So is the Pentagon.

"Ford has been on the leading edge in using this technology to reduce injuries and reduce its product development costs," said Matt Reed, director of the Human Motion Simulation Laboratory at the University of Michigan.

The same motion-capture technology that is used to animate movies and video games is tapped by Ford to model the way workers move on the assembly line and design processes that are less stressful on their bodies.

"We can design out problems," ergonomics specialist Allison Stephens said. "You can then optimize the human so that they can do it car after car without fatigue or injury."

Ford uses related technology to simulate every part of the assembly process. It has digitized every one of its assembly plants in North America and developed sophisticated virtual workers -- Jack and Jill -- to labor in them. These "avatars" are more than just graphical representations of human beings; they model every muscle and bone and are subject to the same limitations as flesh-and-blood employees.

Before a prototype of a new car or truck is built, Ford assembles the entire product development team, including engineers from parts suppliers, in its virtual manufacturing facility and puts the vehicle together in cyberspace.

Dan Hettel, the engineer who overseas the lab, said things have evolved a lot since he first came to Ford 22 years ago.

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