Steve Beck, president and CEO of SantosHuman. located in the University of Iowa's BioVentures Center, says the company's human-centric approach to product design can save manufacturers millions in lost time and costly redesign.

Manufacturers spend millions building better mousetraps, but rare is the company that stops to consider the mouse.

Enter SantosHuman, the Coralville-based "niche market engineering software" spinout that aims to turn the traditional product design and engineering process on its head by encouraging manufacturers to take a close look at the mice - in this case, the world of potential end-use customers - before ever committing pen to paper or plan to prototype.

"Find something that somebody manufactures that doesn't ultimately require human interaction - you can't do it," said Steve Beck, president and CEO of SantosHuman, which claims to offer
"the only software on the market that can predict human performance based on the physics of the human body."

"You would not believe the amount of effort that goes into the design of a light bulb, because it seems silly, but somebody's got to screw that sucker in," Mr. Beck said, adding that his company's technology, which uses predictive mathematical modeling of human strength, fatigue, flexibility, balance, vision and posture, as well as external factors such as environment, clothing and gender, can help.

Spun out from the University of Iowa's Virtual Soldier Research program founded in 2003 by Karim Abdel-Malek, SantosHuman builds on a system first created to help the U.S. military test vehicles and weapons in the virtual world instead of out in the field. Now, though, in addition to helping the military save millions on tanks, the technology is helping manufacturers better design everything from heavy machinery and automobiles to detergent bottles and everyday consumer goods.

"Everybody that makes anything that ultimately requires human interaction should be using our software," said Mr. Beck. "We can look at the human-centric components of a design at the earliest stages of product development, so that we can inform and support decisions at those stages when change is still an option."

Unlike competing digital human models in the marketplace, which rely on pre-recorded motion capture data, SantosHuman's model is physics-based; its avatars behave as autonomous humans capable of predicting real-life interaction with products and processes. The difference allows for a multitude of simulations under different conditions as well as differences in human size, mobility, range of motion or strength.

Read the full story at corridorbusiness.com.  

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