Influence of reading format on reading activity under uniaxial whole body vibration

• Reading discomfort has been found to increase with increase in vibration magnitude.
• Reading discomfort is more during fore-&-aft vibration in WB posture, SCF format.
• In vertical and lateral vibration, reading discomfort decreases with backrest support.
• Reading discomfort is least for triple-column format compared to other reading formats.

In a railway vehicle, the vibrations are transmitted to the passengers through the various interfaces such as floor, seat, backrest etc. These vibrations affect the passenger comfort as well as their performance to do any work such as reading, writing, typing etc. In the present work, effects of vibration magnitude, direction of vibration, postures and reading formats have been studied on the reading activity. Thirty healthy male subjects have performed reading task, one at a time. All subjects were exposed to uni-axial whole body vibration in 1–20 Hz frequency range at 0.5, 1 and 1.5 m/s2 rms vibration magnitude. The experimental task involved reading a paragraph under the different 54 experimental conditions (three magnitude, three direction, two posture and three reading format). The task performance has been evaluated in terms of time taken by the subjects to read a given paragraph and also the subjective evaluation of perceived difficulty on Borg's CR 10 scale. Perceived difficulty and performance degradation in reading have been found to increase with the increase in vibration magnitude in each direction of vibration. The perceived difficulty and performance degradation in reading have been observed to be higher in the fore-&-aft direction in with-backrest posture. In vertical and lateral vibration, perceived difficulty and performance degradation have been higher in without-backrest posture compare to with-backrest posture. The perceived difficulty and performance degradation have been lower for the triple-column format.Relevance to industryThere is no availability of standards for the activity comfort in railway vehicles. Consideration of reading discomfort would be useful for vehicle design optimization to facilitate reading comfort.