Relation between Sitting Comfort Evaluation and Physical Properties of Top Coated Fabrics for Car Driver's Seat

Abstract

The importance of comfortable seat design is increasing as customer's expectations rise. Because automotive seats are the significant man machine interface in automobiles.
The sitting comfort of automotive seats, whose top coated fabrics were changed and structures were same, were evaluated by only human tactual sensation while sitting on these seats. The adjectives used for the sensory evaluation by the human tactile sensation were examined by factor analysis.
As the result of factor analysis, two adjectives “high-class” and “thick” were common and significant in evaluating the comfort. But, “sporty” could not be evaluated by the top coated fabrics of seats.
From the result of correlation analysis, it was found that adjectives “smooth”, “warm” and “soft” of top coated fabric were correlated with “high-class” of seat.
Further, “high-class” of seat was described by the multiple regression equation of the impact force and the compressive property from the result of multiple regression analysis.