Evaluation of Driver Fatigue on Truck Seats: Comparison of Air-Inflated and Foam Seat Cushions During Field Testing

This study conducted a series of road tests in the regular fleet operations of a freight shipping service to better understand the relationship between vehicle seat design and driver fatigue, improve two newly proposed objective methods for evaluating driver fatigue, and provide design guidelines for evaluating and improving vehicle seat characteristics in terms of driver fatigue. Based on these results, we find that air-inflated seat cushions have advantages in terms of subjective measures of comfort, support, and fatigue. We show that the objective measure aPcrms highlights characteristic differences between seat cushions, as the air-inflated seat cushion provides less area in high pressure regions, thus occluding less blood flow to tissue in the seated area. This characteristic difference between seat cushions is not highlighted by using previously existing objective measures. This suggests aPcrms is a useful measure and should be considered when evaluating the subjective quality of seat cushion designs under dynamic conditions, such as those existing in commercial truck driving.