Assessing and improving human movements using sensitivity analysis and digital human simulation

Enhancing the performance of technical movements aims both at improving operational results and at reducing biomechanical demands. Advances in human biomechanics and modeling tools allow to evaluate human performance with more and more details. Finding the right modifications to improve the performance is, however, still addressed with extensive time consuming trial-and-error processes. This paper presents a framework for easily assessing human movements and automatically providing recommendations to improve their performances. An optimization-based whole-body controller is used to dynamically replay human movements from motion capture data, to evaluate existing movements. Automatic digital human simulations are then run to estimate performance indicators when the movement is performed in many different ways. Sensitivity indices are thereby computed to quantify the influence of postural parameters on the performance. Based on the results of the sensitivity analysis, recommendations for posture improvement are provided. The method is successfully validated on a drilling activity.