Developed in the early 1980’s, the flail space model has become the standard method for estimating occupant risk in full-scale crash tests involving roadside safety features. The widespread availability of airbags and increased seat belt usage rates in today’s vehicle fleet, however, raise serious questions regarding the validity of the model. Recent implementation of Event Data Recorder (EDR) ...

The occupant impact velocity (OIV) and acceleration severity index (ASI) are competing measures of crash severity used to assess occupant injury risk in full-scale crash tests involving roadside safety hardware, e.g. guardrail. Delta-V, or the maximum change in vehicle velocity, is the traditional metric of crash severity for real world crashes. This study compares the ability of the OIV, ASI, ...

The evaluation of the biomechanical performance that can be expected from alternative designs for restrained occupant rollover protection was approached through the use of finite element modeling. Finite element models of vehicle designs and the Hybrid III dummy were used to evaluate elements of alternative rollover occupant protection system designs. Results from rollover crash tests of a prod...

OBJECTIVE A 3-phase real-world motor vehicle crash (MVC) reconstruction method was developed to analyze injury variability as a function of precrash occupant position for 2 full-frontal Crash Injury Research and Engineering Network (CIREN) cases. METHOD Phase I: A finite element (FE) simplified vehicle model (SVM) was developed and tuned to mimic the frontal crash characteristics of the CIREN...

This paper proposes a methodology that allows the combination of the Stability Factor and handling characteristic to predict the probability of rollover per single vehicle crash. Paper No.202-O Simulation of Occupant Kinematics in Vehicle Rollover Dummy Model versus Human Model Norbert Praxl, Markus Schönpflug, Jiri Adamec Institute for Legal Medicine Munich, Germany Abstract Currently, 25% of ...

Modern vehicle designs tested as part of US consumer information programs achieve high ratings for frontal crash protection. Research is needed to determine how these tests can be upgraded to further improve occupant protection in real-world frontal crashes. The present study is a detailed analysis of real-world cases with serious injuries resulting from frontal crashes of vehicles rated good f...

We undertook a study to determine if the automatic detection and counting of vehicle occupants is feasible. An automated vehicle occupant counting system would greatly facilitate the operation of freeway lanes reserved for buses, car-pools, and emergency vehicles (HOV lanes). In the present paper, we report our findings regarding the appropriate sensor phenomenology and arrangement for the task...

In this paper, we proposed an occupant detection system using single video camera and a distance sensor for an advanced airbag deployment. We detected occupant face using skin color and motion information in real time. The proposed method acquired the color and size of the occupant face using single video camera and calculated the distance information between the occupant and airbag using a dis...

Objective: To assess the relationship between the implementation of a SAFE KIDS Coalition and pediatric unintentional injury rates. Setting: Shelby County, Tennessee. Design: Retrospective observational analysis. Patients: County residents nine years of age or younger presenting to the children’s medical center, its emergency department, or its outpatient clinics from 1990–97. Intervention: Imp...

Robust detection of vehicle occupant posture is necessary for intelligent airbag deployment. This paper presents a vision-based method of estimating the size, posture and pose of the occupant. Utilizing raw reflectance and stereo disparity images, this algorithm presents a mixed-mode approach to finding occupant features. Extensive experiments show the robustness of this mixed-mode method in id...