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This paper presents results of a five phase study conducted to evaluate touch feel and appearance of door armrest materials. Seven different production door armrests with different material characteristics such as softness, smoothness, compressibility, texture, etc. were evaluated. In the first phase, the subjects seated in a vehicle buck in their preferred seating position with the armrests adjusted at their preferred heights, provided ratings on a number of touch feel and appearance of the door armrest materials using 5-point semantic differential scales. In the second phase, the armrests were presented to each subject in all possible pairs and they were asked to select preferred armrest material in each pair.

Seat comfort is a highly subjective attribute and depends on a wide range of factors, but the successful prediction of seat comfort from a group of relevant variables can hold the promise of eliminating the need for time-consuming subjective evaluations during the early stages of seat cushion selection and development. This research presents the subjective seat comfort data of a group of 30 participants using a controlled range of seat foam samples, and attempts to correlate this attribute with a) the anthropometric and demographic characteristics of the participants, b) the objective pressure distribution at the body-seat interface and c) properties of the various foam samples that were used for the test.