  Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) suits are widely used to protect human
operators to execute emergency tasks such as bomb disposal and neutralization.
Current suit designs still need to be improved in terms of wearer comfort,
which can be assessed based on the interaction forces at the human-suit contact
regions. This paper introduces a simulation-based modeling framework that
computes the interaction loads at the human-suit interface based on a wearer's
kinematic movement data. The proposed modeling framework consists of three
primary components: a) inertial and geometric modeling of the EOD suit, b)
state estimation of the wearer's in-suit movement, and c) inverse dynamics
analysis to calculate the human-suit interface forces based on the simulated
human-suit model and the estimated human movement data. This simulation-based
modeling method could be used to complement experimental testing for improving
the time and cost efficiency of EOD suit evaluation. The accuracy of the
simulated interface load was experimentally benchmarked during three different
human tasks (each with three trials), by comparing the predicted interface
forces with that measured by commercial pressure sensors.
