Vibration transmissibility at male and female wrists of the human hand–arm system and modeling

Abstract

The determination of standard values of vibration transmissibility at the wrist of the human body is very important to understanding vibration exposure and developing a valid model. In this work, the effects of human weight, gender, and other factors on the transmissibility of hand–arm vibration and vibration transmissibility in the [Formula: see text]-axis direction at the wrist site were randomly collected from 200 subjects (154 males and 46 females) as per the requirement of the standard ISO 10819. Moreover, the envelopes of the maximum and minimum values, as well as the mean and standard deviation of the vibration transmissibility at the wrist site, were obtained for both genders. Second, the effect of gender differences on the mean value of vibration transmissibility was analyzed. Finally, two three-degree-of-freedom (3-DOF) models of the hand–arm system were developed based on the average values of vibration transmissibility at the wrists of male and female subjects, respectively. The study revealed that the mean value of vibration transmissibility was greater in males than in females in the frequency range of 14–39 Hz. For the rest of the frequency ranges of females, their mean vibration transmissibility is greater than that of males, especially in the range 17–30 Hz. It was also observed that the vibration transmissibility of females is 10–18.5% smaller than that of males. The vibration transmissibility of females is greater than that of males by 40–83% when the frequencies are between 150 Hz and 250 Hz. The novelty of this proposed model is the prediction of model differences between males and females compared to other models that do so without considering gender differences. It is validated that the proposed modified model can be used to predict the vibration transmissibility of the wrist.