An online ergonomic evaluator for 3D product design

An online ergonomic evaluator for 3D product design 

Chien-Fu Kuo, Chih-Hsing Chu * 

Department of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu 300, Taiwan, ROC 

Abstract 

Received 15 May 2004; received in revised form 4 January 2005; accepted 24 February 2005 

Available online 21 April 2005 

This paper presents an online ergonomic evaluation system for 3D product development with car interior design as an 

example, which consists of a 3D viewer, a digital human model, an ergonomic engine, and the web-based GUI’s. The digital 

human is constructed with a number of templates based on anthropometry database that represent various levels of body size and 

shape for the end-user. The interactions between the human and a product model are captured by the viewer, and thus, simulate 

the user operation of the product. According to the Chaffin’s biomechanical model, the ergonomic engine then computes the 

physical loads of body joints with the captured information. The result enables online evaluation of the product design from the 

ergonomic aspects. It also serves as a base of interactive product customization. This research is the first study that realizes the 

web-based ergonomic evaluation for 3D car interior design with no needs of high-end CAD systems or complex VR 

environment. In this manner, the human factor issues can be effectively taken into account at the early design phase and 

the costs of ergonomic evaluation will be significantly reduced. 

# 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 

Keywords: Product design; Digital human model; 3D viewing; Ergonomics; CAD 

1. Introduction 

To satisfy the customer’s needs is a critical issue for 

companies worldwide to survive in the global market. 

Customization (or personalization) is considered an 

effective means to achieve this imperative and should 

be conducted throughout a product lifecycle as 

possible. Hence, human-centered product design [1] 

has received much attention in both academia and 

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +886 3 5742698; 

fax: +886 3 5722685. 

E-mail address: chchu@ie.nthu.edu.tw (C.-H. Chu). 

Computers in Industry 56 (2005) 479–492 

0166-3615/$ – see front matter # 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 

doi:10.1016/j.compind.2005.02.002 

www.elsevier.com/locate/compind 

industries. Like design for manufacturing (DFM) or 

design for assembly (DFA), ergonomic issues must 

also be taken into account at the early design stage. 

Important human factors, such as vision, reach of 

envelope, operation strength, and workloads determine 

to a large extent the product performance, and 

thus, need to be timely accessed during the product life 

cycle. 

Recent progresses in information technologies 

provide many useful tools for accomplishing 

human-centric design. Among them, computer-aided 

software systems have assisted to enhance the 

efficiency of most activities in engineering design

480 

and manufacturing. Integration between heterogeneous 

software systems has also become feasible in 

the modern IT environment. On the other hand, since 

the early 1990s human behavior has been modeled in a 

digital form that enables full-scale ergonomic evaluation, 

both physically and psychologically, in a variety 

of industrial applications [2–4]. To incorporate a 

digital model that simulates human actions in the 

product design process has been recognized as highly 

effective in realizing human-centric product design. 

For instance, vehicle interior design is an engineering 

task that must cautiously consider ergonomic interactions 

between the design and the end-user. Equipments 

in a car should be properly arranged so that the 

driver can posture well and feel comfortable in 

driving. Assessments of car setting are usually very 

time-consuming and involve multidisciplinary team 

members such as engineer, designer, ergonomic 

expert, and test user. Complex facilities such as 

physical mock-up, virtual reality system, and CAD 

software are commonly employed in the assessment 

process. The development costs of these products are 

consequently increased. 

A number of software tools [5–9] have been 

developed for ergonomic design of consumer products, 

machines, workplaces, and occupational 

devices. Most of them utilize full-scale CAD systems 

and/or high-end virtual reality environment for 

ergonomic estimation [10,11]. However, CAD or 

VR tools may not be always available to product 

designers or small/medium enterprises that cannot 

afford such costly tools. In addition, any ergonomic 

evaluation for consumer products should be conducted 

based on appropriate anthropometry data. It is not very 

likely that anthropometry databases and design tools 

are located in one software system within a company, 

and thus, the integration between them poses a serious 

problem. Finally, customers’ inputs are highly 

valuable and most of the time necessary for ergonomic 

design. However, to obtain their opinions within an 

engineering context during the product design remains 

a challenging task. Very little research has addressed 

this issue. 

This study develops a web-based light-weighted 

ergonomic evaluator for vehicle interior design. A 

digital human model is constructed based on Taiwan 

local anthropometry data that enables the user to query 

ergonomic information through a regular browser. 

C.-F. Kuo, C.-H. Chu / Computers in Industry 56 (2005) 479–492 

The product model is simplified from its original 3D 

CAD representation, but still retains necessary 

information for the purpose of ergonomic evaluation. 

This system allows the 3D human to interact with the 

product model, thus mimicking the condition in 

which a person is sitting in the front seat and driving 

the vehicle. Given a posture, physical loads on the 

body joints of the digital human can be computed 

using the Chaffin’s biomechanical model. In this 

manner, the user can interactively adjust the interior 

setting until a better design is obtained that gives a 

more comfortable posture explicitly for the user. This 

work demonstrates the feasibility of web-based 

ergocentric product design with no needs of CAD 

or VR systems. It provides both the designer and endcustomer 

1 an easy but effective solution for ergonomic 

evaluation of product development at the early design 

stage. 

2. Research approaches 

2.1. Digital human modeling 

3D virtual humans have been used in many 

engineering and entertainment applications since the 

early 1990s. For example, interactive computer 

models have served as a substitute for ‘‘the real 

human’’ in the ergonomic evaluation for designs of 

vehicles, work areas, machine tools, occupational 

devices, etc. prior to the actual construction [12–14]. 

They successfully provide a real-time representation 

of human beings or other live participants embedded 

in virtual environment. In addition, the designer is able 

to collect customers’ feedback based on a digital 

model that simulates human behaviors both physically 

and psychologically at the early concept design phase. 

In addition, such a digital human can carry useful 

information like body shapes, dimensions, motion 

constraints, and operation sequences in 3D space that 

must be taken into account in detailed design. 

Allowing the end-user, characterized by the digital 

human, to interact with the product model facilitates 

product personalization as the design process evolves. 

1 Both the professional designer and the general customer can use 

the proposed ergonomic evaluation system. There is no direct link 

between these two roles. ‘‘The user’’ can mean either one depending 

on the context in this paper.

The designer can also use the model as an effective 

medium to demonstrate the final design by rendering a 

scenario for the product in use. It is generally 

recognized that combining 3D CAD technologies 

with digital human models enables 3D digital mockup 

for product evaluation and testing during its entire 

lifecycle, thus reducing the product development time 

and costs [15]. 

2.2. 3D visualization 

Ergonomic evaluation of a product often involves 

3D design information such as shape, size, distance, 

and position. These design parameters must be derived 

from the product model, most likely a CAD 

representation. The derivation process usually 

requires user interactions, and thus, cannot be 

accomplished automatically in many occasions. A 

user interface between 3D CAD and the ergonomic 

evaluation tool is needed when they are not fully 

integrated in a software system. It is not practically 

feasible for the end-user (customer in this case) to 

specify those parameters directly in a CAD system. 

This is because, first, they may not be able to work 

with CAD software. Second, most of the time the user 

and the product designer are physically located in 

different places. Currently, most commercial CAD 

systems do not provide interfaces for the end-user to 

remotely access product design information. As a 

result, it is difficult to realize the concept of product 

customization in practice, particularly concerning 

ergonomics. 

3D visualization technology [16] was originally 

developed for viewing CAD files and design data 

without CAD systems or advanced graphics environment. 

This technology has been successfully applied 

to the Internet-based collaborative design environments 

[17–20]. Several commercial CAD viewers 

[21,22] have been developed and successfully 

deployed in industry. The underlying principle of 

3D viewing is to simplify a CAD model with 3D 

polygons (or meshes) so that the file size becomes 

small enough for its transmission and manipulation via 

the Internet with minimal latency [23]. The simplification 

process discards most topological and highlevel 

design feature information but retains important 

geometric data. Such a model may not be suitable for 

engineering design per se, but it fits well in many other 

C.-F. Kuo, C.-H. Chu / Computers in Industry 56 (2005) 479–492 481 

applications in a product lifecycle; for instance, it 

facilitates design review by providing easy-to-access 

tools for non-design people, such as managers, 

production staff, suppliers, and marketing people 

[24]. The similar technology has been applied to 

online interactive catalogs for 3D components [25– 

27]. Most commercial product data management 

(PDM) systems also adopt it for viewing multimedia, 

complex design data, and BOM information [28,29]. 

These examples demonstrate the potential of 3D 

visualization as an interfacing technology for capturing 

customer feedback during the product design. 

Therefore, this study extends its use to on-line 

ergonomic evaluation. 

To realize on-line ergonomic evaluation for 3D 

product design, the following functional requirements 

must be fulfilled by the implementation platform: (1) 

user interactions, (2) 3D object manipulation, (3) 

accessibility via the Internet, and (4) integration with 

other legacy systems. VR, CAD, and 3D visualization 

techniques were originally developed for distinct 

purposes. They all provide the above functions, but 

may fit differently into our purpose from practical 

aspects [30]. Table 1 illustrates their comparison from 

various metrics. 3D visualization is chosen for the 

implementation of this study, as it has a lower cost, 

requires less use skills and network bandwidth, is 

easier for customization, and accessible to everyone in 

certain occasions. 

2.3. Anthropometry database 

Research of the human body and its parts are 

generally classified into two categories: static anthropometry 

and dynamic anthropometry. The former is 

related to stress and force calculations for the human 

body under static and stable postures. The results have 

Table 1 

Comparison of VR, CAD, and 3D visualization for product customization 

[30] 

VR CAD 3D viewer 

Cost High Medium to high Low 

User skills High High Low 

Network bandwidth 

required 

High Medium Low 

Easy customization Low Medium to high High 

Accessibility Low Medium High

482 

been applied to guide the design of hand tools, 

furniture, and other consumer products [31,32]. The 

latter is focused on analyzing the action angles, 

trajectories, and reaching spaces of the body parts 

under specified human motions. It contributes to the 

design of work environment, machines, production 

lines, and other occupational equipments [33,34]. 

Ergonomic assessment for the car interior design 

mainly concerns static anthropometry. In this study, a 

digital model is constructed with a local anthropometry 

database in Taiwan [35], which serves as a 

complete data source for characterizing the 3D human 

body of both male and female adults in the country. 

This human model can be customized according to 

different body sizes chosen by the user. The 

customization is performed based on the template 

approach [36] previously developed in which human 

models at different scales are controlled by a set of 

anthropometrical parameters. The design of this 

anthropometry database follows three important 

guidelines: (1) design for extreme individuals, (2) 

design for adjustable range, and (3) design for average. 

2.4. Posture generation 

The digital human can be placed in a set of postures 

that are recognized in a motion capturer and modeled 

with the captured data [37]. The human motion is 

comprised of a set of rigid parts connected by joints, 

referred to as a human template, as shown in Fig. 1.A 

different human template is generated from each 

anthropometry data set that corresponds to a specific 


percentage of the body size. These rigid parts are 

allowed to rotate and translate with respect to the 

connected joints under biomechanical constraints. 

Complex and realistic postures are thus created with 

minimal user’s interactions. Moreover, compounding 

homogeneous transformations are applied to generate 

the postures of body extremity [38]. For instance, the 

posterior segments, like wrist’s final position, are 

determined by a series of the anterior segment’s 

rotations including forearm, upper arm, and torso. 

Note that the use of the human templates helps a nonskilled 

designer easily create realistic character 

postures by learning only a small set of key 

parameters. 

2.5. Posture evaluation 

The mechanism for the posture evaluation is based 

on a musculoskeletal load assessment method 

proposed by Chaffin and Baker [39]. This twodimensional 

static sagittal model (see Fig. 2) divides 

human body into seven major parts [40]. The 

dimensions of each part are collected and stored in 

the anthropometric database. Ignoring the influence of 

inertia, we compute the angle of each joint and 

combine the result with the dimensional data. In the 

posture assessment, the focus is on shoulder, elbow, 

wrist, hip, knee, and toe. The relative positions 

between important body points and the product are 

Fig. 1. 3D human template based on motion capture data. Fig. 2. Chaffin’s biomechanical model [39].

calculated after the user has accommodated the digital 

human template to the simplified 3D model in the 

viewer. The stress induced by the posture on lumbar 

vertebra is then estimated. 

3. System architecture 

The on-line ergonomic evaluator proposed in this 

study consists of five major software components: 3D 

viewer, posture generator, ergonomic evaluation 

engine, interface to CAD system, and the web-based 

GUI’s. Fig. 3 illustrates the corresponding system 

architecture. Each module and the data flows among 

them are described as follows. 

3.1. 3D viewer 

Actify SpinFire TM [21] is an integral part of the 

system. It provides Software Development Kits (SDK) 


Fig. 3. System architecture of the online ergonomic evaluation system. 

in a number of programming languages (JavaScript, 

VB, and C++) for customized development tasks. This 

software converts commercial CAD model into its 

proprietary file format—.3D for better file transmission 

and manipulation over the Internet. The conversion 

process produces a set of 2D meshes from the 

geometry of the CAD model, usually according to 

Delaunay Triangulation algorithms [41]. Most topological 

information and other engineering attributes 

are not retained in the .3D file for file size reduction. 

Such a light-weighted model is more suitable to 

network transmission and online manipulation. This 

software also provides a graphical environment for 

real-time rendering .3D models. Simple dimensional 

data such as length and angle can be calculated 

interactively in 3D GUI’s or programmatically via 

API’s. In addition, this viewer can serves as a plug-in 

in Windows TM application programs, so its customization 

and integration with other systems are 

convenient.

484 

3.2. Web-based GUI 

The web-based graphical user interface (GUI) is 

embedded in Microsoft Explorer 6.1 using simple 

HTML format. Java Server Pages (JSP TM ) technology 

connects the viewer to multi-media data sources 

within a browser environment. A variety of languages 

like JavaScript, VBScript, and DHTML provide 

effective tools for the GUI implementation in a JSP 

program. The GUI also enables instant communications 

between the system and the user with integration 

with standard Windows UI components. 

3.3. Server technology 

This system adopts Apache Tomcat TM as a web 

application server that links the 3D viewer embedded in 

the web-based GUI and the reference engines (posture 

generator and ergonomic evaluation engine) at the back 

end. A commercial Java SDK–JXL TM offers an interfacing 

technology for the data transfer between the 

viewer and the posture generator constructed in Microsoft 

Excel TM spreadsheets, or related rule databases. 

3.4. Posture generator 

The human templates produce a variety of postures 

required in ergonomic evaluation. It is constructed from 

a massive amount of the body motion data captured with 

a full-scale high-speed camera. Different patterns of 

human configuration are recognized from the captured 

data using data mining techniques [42], andtheresults 

are stored in Microsoft Excel TM spreadsheets. Each 

template usually corresponds to a set of coordinate 

transformations for various body parts involved in the 

generation of a particular posture. These spatial 

relationships exist in Excel TM tables and drive the 

configuration change of the digital human in the viewer 

through SpinFire SDK and its internal mathematical 

functions. This posture generator also offers the viewer 

the detailed dimensions of any chosen human model. It 

also passes the posture data along with the user inputs 

over to the evaluation engine. 

3.5. Ergonomic evaluation engine 

The system currently allows ergonomic evaluation 

for a set of sitting postures using a two-dimensional 


statically biomechanical model. The evaluation result 

consists of the compression as well as shear forces on 

L5/S1 and moments/forces at critical joints of the 

upper limbs including shoulder, elbow, and wrist. The 

corresponding formulae are explicitly expressed in 

Excel TM and all the related computations are 

performed with VBA. The posture generator provides 

the pose data required in the evaluation through direct 

binding between two Excel threads. The engine then 

sends the outcome over to the user via the application 

server in HTTP protocol. The viewer is running a 

socket thread pending for the response from the 

engine. The server will refresh the browser and publish 

with the evaluation data. Note that more biomechanics 

models can be readily appended into the engine for 

other ergonomic evaluations. 

4. Implementation and discussions 

4.1. Scenario I 

We illustrate two scenarios that demonstrate on-line 

design evaluation for ergonomics using the proposed 

system. In the first scenario, the user remotely opens up a 

browser embedding with the 3D viewer via the Internet 

and establishes a HTTP link to the server, as shown in 

Fig. 4. The main page consists of three modules. The left 

one (L) provides a set of UI’s withwhichtheusercan 

query geometric information in the current design. The 

middle area (M) contains a 3D display space of the 

viewer and a history data access area. The user can 

change the pose of the digital human with the joint 

angles keyed in from the right module (R). The 

evaluation process generally consists of the following 

steps shown in Figs. 5–8, respectively: 

(1) Choose an interior design from the drop down 

menu in middle module. 

(2) Generate preferable 3D views and record them for 

future evaluation. 

(3) Measure the dimensions in 3D space that 

determine the comfort of the current interior 

setting. 

(4) Calculate the corresponding joint angle (the hip 

angle in this case). 

(5) Repeat (4) and (5) for each joint angle (six angles 

to be determined in this example).

(6) Query the forces and the force moments from the 

back end evaluation engine. 

In Step (1), the user can choose a design from 

different car interior settings residing in a remote CAD 


Fig. 4. User interface of the ergonomic evaluator embedded in a browser. 

Fig. 5. User is selecting a design from different car interior settings. 

database and upload it to the system for examination 

(see Fig. 5). Note that the chosen CAD model will be 

automatically converted into the .3D file format before 

the upload. The conversion process is accomplished 

via a publishing program embedded in the CAD sy-

486 

stem. The user has already selected a specific human 

model corresponding to his/her body shape and size 

generated from the anthropometry database. 

Next, the user may want to examine the chosen 

design in more details by zooming, rotating, cross 

sectioning, and other graphic techniques offered by 

the system (see Fig. 6). It is also useful that the 

intermediate results can be saved for future estimation 

purpose. The user can instantly retrieve them without 

tweaking the GUI’s one more time. The next step is to 

interactively adjust the car settings in the 3D space. 


Fig. 6. User is accessing the design in more detail. 

In this example, the seat angle is the major parameter 

that can be interactively changed, and thus, influence 

the sitting comfort. It controls the position of the wheel 

steering relative to the human being seated in the front 

car. Direct measurement of such 3D dimensional data 

might be difficult for end customers. To overcome this 

problem, the system provides them a simple button for 

automatic 3D measurement of the angle. This is 

implemented by locating the location of the measured 

objects in 3D space and inquiring their relative 

position with corresponding API’s provided by 

Fig. 7. Automatic calculation of the relative position between seat angles.

SpinFire TM SDK.Theresultisthencombinedwiththe 

anthropometrical data comprising the digital human in 

use and sent over to the pose generator for determining 

the value of the corresponding joint angle (the hip angle 

in this case). The similar procedure must be applied to 

produce all the required joint angles, including elbow, 

shoulder, hip, knee, ankle, and toe. The system then 

transmits these parameter values along with the 

anthropometrical data over to the back end ergonomic 

evaluation engine over the Internet. The engine can thus 

calculate forces/stresses for various body joints in the 

given posture and design settings. The server prompts 

the user in real-time with a new page containing the 

evaluation result (see Fig. 8), and thus, helps determine 

whether the current design needs further improvement. 

4.2. Scenario II 

Online customization of car interior design using 

3D human model is another good application of the 

proposed idea. The main screen designed for running 

this scenario consists of three modules, similar to that 

of the first scenario, as shown in Fig. 9. The left 

module provides the user drop down lists for selecting 

a specific digital human model for the current use. The 

middle area contains a 3D display space of the viewer 

and a history data access area. The user can adjust the 

interior design through the UI’s in the right module 

(R). A typical operational procedure consist of: 


Fig. 8. Evaluation results for various joints generated from the ergonomic engine. 

(1) Choose an interior design from the drop down 

menu in middle module. 

(2) Determine a digital human model that fits the user 

best. 

(3) Generate preferable 3D views and record them for 

future evaluation. 

(4) Adjust the car setting according to the digital 

human. 

(5) Perform the ergonomic evaluation described in the 

first scenario if needed. 

Similar to the first scenario, the user has to choose a 

design model from the CAD database. The system 

then automatically constructs a 3D digital human according 

to the chosen anthropometric data. Currently, 

the available options include: gender (male, female) 

and the figure size percentage (95, 90, 50, 10, and 5%). 

The model of a full-scale 3D human is thus imported 

from the pose generator into the viewer. Fig. 9 demonstrates 

a Taiwanese male with a 50% percentage 

line. In contrast, a female with a 90% percentage line 

is shown in Fig. 10. Note that the imported models 

have been converted into the .3D format, which has a 

small file size and easy to be transmitted and graphically 

manipulated in a browser environment. 

In theory, the car interior setting must fit the digital 

human as close as possible to create comfort at a given 

pose. The user can interactively adjust the seat setting, 

mainly controlled by the seat angle and the steering

488 

wheel position, through a set of UI’s provided by the 

system. These interfaces allows 3D rotation and 

translation of the model with embedded SpinFire TM 

API’s. Note that the system maintains the seat, the 

steering wheel, and other part models as individual 

components in an assembly, namely the car interior 

setting, and thus, they can be freely manipulated and 

transformed in 3D space. The user can change the 


Fig. 9. 3D product customization using the online ergonomic evaluator. 


setting and inspect the result visually or using the 

distance measurement function of the viewer until a 

comfortable posture is obtained. Fig. 11 shows that the 

steering wheel is highlighted after the user has clicked it 

for the position adjustment. The wheel is moved to the 

new position corresponding to a translation with 

500 mm in each x, y, andz-axis, as shown in Fig. 12. 

Finally, the user can switch to the first scenario by

clicking the tabs (in the upper left in Fig. 9), and thus, 

perform necessary ergonomic evaluation for the 

customization result. 

The first scenario has demonstrated online assessment 

of the comfort of a given posture in a car design. 

If the result is not satisfactory, the user may want to 

change the position of the steering wheel or the 

seat angle until a better design is obtained. The 

resulting optimal design parameters can be automatically 

extracted from the viewer and stored in a 



Fig. 12. The new wheel position after customization. 

PDM system for actual engineering changes. In the 

second scenario, the end-user can adjust the car 

interior to fit a full-scale 3D digital human corresponding 

to his/her body shape. Likewise, the relative 

positions between the car setting and the model can 

be readily acquired, and thus, lend a support to 

necessary design modification. In this manner, this 

system provides simple yet effective online tools for 

accomplishing product customization and personalization.

490 

The 3D viewer—SpinFire TM plays an integral part 

in the proposed system. It does serve as a lightweight 

interface for the user to access 3D data through the 

Internet. The API’s allow for easy customization and 

access to the Windows resources with JavaScript, 

C++, and Visual Basic. Coordinate transformation 

operations of translation, rotation, scaling, and their 

combination are also provided. These operations 

enable the user to manipulate 3D objects interactively 

over the network, which is one major advantage that 

3D visualization technology has over other web-based 

multi-media tools. However, there are several limitations 

in the 3D viewer used in the system. It requires 

installation of a browser plug-in for the first time use, 

which may cause a security concern in certain 

enterprise applications. Another bigger restriction of 

the current ergonomic evaluator is that it does not 

allow for change of the product geometry or 

engineering attributes. The user can only determine 

the product arrangement (the relative positions 

between parts in the above case) instead of full-scale 

customization, due to the limited functions of the 

viewer. All the available commercial viewers 

[21,22,43,44] are quite deficient in this category. 

5. Conclusions 

This paper has presented an online ergonomic 

evaluation system for 3D car interior design using 

web-based 3D visualization technology. This system 

does not require advanced CAD tools or virtual reality 

facilities. It provides a virtual human in digital model 

that acts as the actual user and enables interactions 

with the product. This digital human is constructed 

with anthropometry data that characterizes the body 

shape and size at different levels for adults in Taiwan. 

Car interior design is used in this study for 

demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed system. 

The user can adjust the car setting to fit the digital 

human through 3D GUI’s embedded in a browser 

via the Internet. An ergonomic evaluation engine 

calculates the induced stresses and forces corresponding 

to the posture created by the user. The calculation 

results are immediately prompted and help the user 

access the product design from the ergonomic 

aspect. In this manner, the user can tailor the product 

model according to individual preferences, and thus, 


online product personalization is effectively achieved, 

both technologically and economically. Additionally, 

this work has demonstrated the potential of 3D 

visualization technologies in the Internet-based mass 

customization, linking the end-customer to product 

design. They are applicable to other E-commerce 

activities, e.g. collection of marketing intelligences, 

customer relationship management (CRM), and 

customer-driven configuration to order (CTO). 

The ergonomic evaluation developed in this study 

is focused on biomechanical concerns. However, 

psychological factors also play an important role in 

evaluating a product and its acceptance by customers. 

More studies should be conducted on how to 

accomplish online psychological assessment for 

consumer products. In addition, the recent progress 

in force-feedback (haptic) devices brings up new 

opportunities for ergonomic evaluation. This technology 

enables on-line physical simulation that is likely 

to realize collaboratively distributed product assembly 

and testing. Another research worth of pursuing is to 

develop web-based 3D visualization technologies that 

allow the user to modify product design over the 

network. This requires novel meshing techniques for 

CAD models and advanced data structure for 

integration of engineering attributes. Our future 

research is concerned with this topic. 

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492 

Chih Hsing Chu attended National Taiwan 

University in Taipei, Taiwan, and 

received his BS and MS degrees from 

the Mechanical Engineering Department. 

He worked as a visiting researcher for one 

year at the Laboratory for Machine Tools 

and Production Engineering (WZL), 

RWTH Aachen, Germany. He received 

his PhD degree in mechanical engineering 

at the Laboratory for Manufacturing 

Automation, University of California at Berkeley. His project work 

at Berkeley concerned Internet-based product design and manufacturing. 

He worked as a web applications engineer at RedSpark Inc., 

an Autodesk Venture, on development of web-based collaboration 

software. His past work experiences also include a research intern at 

DaimlerChrysler AG, Stuttgart, Germany, and a technical consultant 

for Standford Co. Ltd., Taoyuan, Taiwan. Prior to joining National 

Tsing Hua University in 2002, he was on the faculty of Industrial and 


Systems Engineering Department, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg. His 

research interests include product development, collaborative 

design, geometric modeling, CAD/CAM, and precision manufacturing. 

He is a Member of the SME, ASME, and PDMA. 

Chien Fu Kuo is a PhD candidate in the 

Department of Industrial Engineering and 

Industrial Management, National Tsing 

Hua University, Taiwan, Republic of 

China. He received his bachelor degree 

in industrial design from National Cheng 

Kung University in 2002. His past work 

experience include a design intern at 

NOVA Design Co. Ltd., Taipei, Taiwan, 

a research intern at Chi Mei Medical 

Center, Tainan, Taiwan, and a research intern at Ford Motor 

Company, Taoyuan, Taiwan. His research interests include computer 

aided ergonomics, digital human modeling, and product design.

An online ergonomic evaluator for 3D product design

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