Product design evaluation model of child car seat using gray relational analysis

This paper attempts to explore a design evaluation system dealing with the ergonomic comfort problems for the child car seat designers. The new product design evaluation (abbreviated as PDE) model is developed through two stages. The first stage is to perform an ergonomic experiment to find out the relations between the comfort and the interface pressures on the child subjects. The second stage is to construct a PDE model by applying the method of gray relational analysis with programming languages. Final results show that the new PDE model is very effective for the car safety seat designers to solve the complex problems of ergonomic comfort. Therefore, the new model can provide designers a scientific method supporting decisions on the new product design of child car seats. Some suggestions by using this model for the reference of future researchers are also provided.