Abstract
This study focuses on the effect of body armor fit on Warfighter mobility as measured by range of motion. Forty male active duty military personnel participated in the study with four different body armor configurations: Baseline, Initial Fit, Increased and Decreased sizes. The results indicated that the degradations in the Decreased and Initial Fit sizes were always statistically equivalent to each other, however, mobility in the Increased size were further degraded; 5° for the extension and rotation movements on average and up to 1 inch for flexion and reach. More importantly, across all the movements while wearing an Increased size further degraded mobility by 2.4% on average relative to the Decreased or Initial fit size. Therefore, when evaluated by ROM measurements, there was no benefit to wearing a smaller body armor size to improve mobility relative to the Initial Fit size, but there was a penalty wearing an Increased size.
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Acknowledgments
This research was funded by Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center (NSRDEC) research program 14-041. The authors would like to thank those individuals that assisted as data collectors and those Warfighters who volunteered as test participants for their time and effort, as well as for the sacrifices they make every day for our country.
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Choi, H.J., Mitchell, K.B., Garlie, T.N., DeSimone, L. (2019). Effects of Body Armor Fit on Warfighter Mobility as Measured by Range of Motion (ROM). In: Goonetilleke, R., Karwowski, W. (eds) Advances in Physical Ergonomics & Human Factors. AHFE 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 789. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94484-5_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94484-5_2
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