Evaluation for sitting comfort of railway vehicle with optical topography

Abstract

Passenger’s seats of railway vehicle have important role to provide comfortable transportation. The increase in sitting comfort is directly connected with the increase in the ride comfort of railway vehicle. In order to estimate the comfort of railway vehicle, we focused on the brain activity obtained from optical topography besides questionnaire as a subjective evaluation. We evaluated the sitting comfort of seats of Shinkansen high speed train and express train by using the optical topography under changing the hardness of seat cushion. Although the sympathy obtained from optical topography in case of the short time sitting disagrees with the comfort feelings of good or bad estimated from the questionnaire, the correlation between the sympathy obtained from brain activity extracted from the subjects who can correctly estimate the hardness of seat cushion and the subjective evaluation of a preference was shown. In case of long time sitting, the time series changes of stress brain index are similar to the feelings tendency of subjective evaluation. Further the subjects who have pains in their body always feel high stress under sitting condition.