Abstract
Recently, it seems that the public transportation facility's designs are required to take the idea of universal design into consideration. This demand is getting stronger and stronger as the Japan's population grows older. In this study, the authors give eyes to a railway station as one of the most popular public transportation facilities, and wish to develop a designing method concerning the idea of universal design to reduce physical workload when people use it. In order to achieve this purpose, we think it important to evaluate designs quantitatively, not subjectively. We tried to evaluate the workload of walking upstairs and downstairs, which is supposed to give people the highest workload in the body movement performed in a station, by EMG of the legs. To quantify the workloads, we measured EMGs of pretibial muscle, gastrocnemial muscle, rectus femoris muscle, and biceps femoris muscle, and ground reaction. We also evaluated the effects of handrails for elderly people by calculating indexes from EMGs.
