Aircraft interiors, effects on the human body and experienced comfort

Have you ever sat in a cramped airplane? Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with limited legroom might not be a comfortable experience while flying in an airplane. Therefore, human anthropometrics or body dimensions are important to consider when designing for interiors used by a large population. To accommodate people of all sizes, a certain minimum pitch (distance of rows of seats) and seat-width are needed in an aircraft. However, increasing pitch and width is probably not the best for airline revenues, as an increasing pitch will reduce the number of passengers and thereby the income. Therefore, other solutions are needed as well. This Ph.D. research can be helpful for airlines to find the optimum as background information is gathered about the level of comfort experienced by passengers in different seat sizes. This research aims to understand how to predict comfort by looking at the physical entities, their interaction with the human, the human body effects, and perceived effects. The application area of the model is the aircraft interior. Experiments with a variety of participants, products, and tasks were conducted and measurements of the interaction, human body effects, and perceived effects were recorded. These studies prove that indeed comfort and discomfort are a result of the interaction, human body effects, and perceived effects, and these aspects could be used as a predictor of comfort. And comfort can be predicted, for instance, based on pitch and width related to anthropometry, but also based on heart rate variability (HRV) parameters. This research proves that physical entities can predict comfort, and observing the interaction and recording human body effects like HRV can predict comfort as well. Additionally, there are good questionnaires available for many situations predicting and recording comfort. Designers can use these methods to create a better functional aircraft interior which then increases passenger comfort.