Whole-body vibration biodynamics - a critical review: I. Experimental biodynamics

Abstract

In the framework of whole-body vibration (WBV), biodynamics refers to biomechanical responses of the human body to impressed oscillatory forces or motions. The biodynamic responses of the human body to WBV form an essential basis for an understanding of mechanical-equivalent properties of the body and potential injury mechanisms, developments in frequencyweightings and design tools of systems coupled with the human operator. In this first part, the biodynamic responses obtained experimentally in terms of 'to-the-body' and 'through-the-body' functions, are critically reviewed and discussed to highlight influences of various contributory factors, such as those S. Rakheja et al.related to posture, body support, anthropometry and nature of vibration, together with the range of experimental conditions. The reported data invariably show highly complex, nonlinear and coupled effects of the majority of the contributory factors. It is shown that the reported studies often conclude conflicting effects of many factors, such as posture, gender, vibration and support conditions.

Study on the Vibration Behavior of the Head of an Upright Seated Human under Vertical Whole-Body Vibration

“…For example, some scholars studied the response at the forehead 8-11 while other authors studied the response at places such as the crown of the head 12 or the tooth 4 . However, since the differences between subjects and experimental conditions also impact the results 13 , there may be a signi cant bias in applying data from different literature to analyze the response behavior to varying parts of the head. To explore the dynamic response behavior of different positions of the seated human head, this study established and veri ed the human nite element model with detailed bone and muscle soft tissues under the biomechanical characteristics and adopted the methods of modal analysis and stochastic response analysis to quantify the vibration response behavior of the vertical seated human head in the sagittal and coronal planes in the forms of modal amplitude and vibration transmittance.…”