Computational Design of Body‐Supporting Assemblies

Abstract A body‐supporting assembly is an assembly of parts that physically supports a human body during activities like sitting, lying, or leaning. A body‐supporting assembly has a complex global shape to support a specific human body posture, yet each component part has a relatively simple geometry to facilitate fabrication, storage, and maintenance. In this paper, we aim to model and design a personalized body‐supporting assembly that fits a given human body posture, aiming to make the assembly comfortable to use. We choose to model a body‐supporting assembly from scratch to offer high flexibility for fitting a given body posture, which however makes it challenging to determine the assembly's topology and geometry. To address this problem, we classify parts in the assembly into two categories according the functionality: supporting parts for fitting different portions of the body and connecting parts for connecting all the supporting parts to form a stable structure. We also propose a geometric representation of supporting parts such that they can have a variety of shapes controlled by a few parameters. Given a body posture as input, we present a computational approach for designing a body‐supporting assembly that fits the posture, in which the supporting parts are initialized and optimized to minimize a discomfort measure and then the connecting parts are generated using a procedural approach. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by designing body‐supporting assemblies that accommodate to a variety of body postures and 3D printing two of them for physical validation.