Modeling and Simulation of Pregnant Workers

Abstract

This Research proposes to answer the question: “Can a pregnancy simulator worn by non-pregnant females of childbearing years replicate the pregnant condition closely enough to yield comparable, correlating results to a preexisting study done using pregnant subjects”? To address the legitimacy of modeling pregnancy using a pregnancy simulator, a study of working surface heights by Paul, Frings-Dresen, Salle & Rozendal (1995) is being closely replicated. Non-pregnant women of child bearing years wearing “The Empathy Belly” pregnancy simulator (U.S. Patent 4,531,919) will be used as research subjects instead of pregnant women. In this study, each volunteer will select the preferred standing working surface height to perform manual work - once while wearing the pregnancy simulator and once without it. These self selected comfortable working surface heights will be recorded along with anthropometric and demographic information from each volunteer. A comparison will be made between this new data with the current standard for working surface height by Grandjean (1988) and the outcomes of the study by Paul et al. (1995).