An Active Female Human Body Model for Simulation of Rear‐End Impact Scenarios

Abstract

Whiplash associated disorder (WAD) is a type of injury caused by rear-end impacts. It is a painful long-term injury of the soft tissue in the neck, which women suffer from 1.5 to 3 times more often compared to men. Progress in WAD research is difficult, as (i) it occurs at a loading level where muscle activity can no longer be neglected, (ii) as soft tissue characteristics play an essential role in WAD and (iii) there is no consensus on the injury mechanism causing WAD. Therefore, computational models of the human body are the most promising method to advance the understanding of WAD. Here, improvements of boundary and initial conditions are presented together with a discussion of its effects on the head kinematics and neck load.

Dynamic human body models in vehicle safety: An overview

“…Tuning postural and reflex controllers [54,102] can be challenging because of the large number of simulations required to converge on a solution. Although surrogate models [38,39] are being developed to reduce simulation times further, it is still typical to simulate both multibody and finite element models using numerical integration.…”

“…Muscle activity strongly influences posture during the pre-crash phase because the accelerations are considerably lower when compared to the in-crash phase (Figure 3). Control systems that emulate the reflexes measured during in-vivo driving experiments have been developed so that the resulting changes in posture can be predicted [54,102]. Tuning postural and reflex controllers [54,102] can be challenging because of the large number of simulations required to converge on a solution.…”

“…Control systems that emulate the reflexes measured during in-vivo driving experiments have been developed so that the resulting changes in posture can be predicted [54,102]. Tuning postural and reflex controllers [54,102] can be challenging because of the large number of simulations required to converge on a solution. Although surrogate models [38,39] are being developed to reduce simulation times further, it is still typical to simulate both multibody and finite element models using numerical integration.…”

Finite Element Human Body Models to study Sex-differences in Whiplash Injury: Validation of VIVA+ passive response in rear-impact

“…Computational models of human and finite element (FE) human body models (HBM) in particular, offer a detailed alternative to ATDs as they can capture intricate morphological aspects of the human body as well as model non-linear and viscous material response in the tissues (Cronin, 2011). Another advantage of FE-HBMs is the ability to model muscle activations that may play a role in whiplash injury mechanisms (Blouin et al, 2006;Putra et al, 2019;Kempter et al, 2021). FE-HBMs also give the flexibility to parametrically explore the influence of the potential factors that can cause injuries, for example, posture, material, and morphological variations (John et al, 2019;Cronin, 2021b, 2021a;Gierczycka et al, 2021).…”