Automobile crashes are the largest single cause of death for pregnant females and the leading cause of traumatic fetal injury mortality in the United States. A previously validated MADYMO computer model of a 30-week pregnant occupant was used in this study to investigate the pregnant occupant response in a New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) frontal barrier motor vehicle crash. The effect of the ...

Two different rollover crash scenarios were simulated with the software Madymo. The vehicle kinematics in the numerical simulation were prescribed by the use of sensor signals of real crash tests. The Madymo 50% Hybrid III dummy model as well as the Madymo human model was applied to these simulations and the model kinematics were analysed and compared. Differences in the kinematics of human and...

The passenger vehicle occupant fatality rate at nighttime is about three times higher than the daytime rate. In 2005, among the fatally injured passenger vehicle occupants, the proportion of unrestrained occupants was much higher during nighttime than daytime. Also during nighttime, among passenger vehicle occupants killed in crashes, alcohol involvement, speeding, and single-­vehicle crash fat...

Delta-V, the change in velocity of a vehicle, is a widely used predictor of occupant injury in vehicle collisions. In real world crashes, delta-V is commonly estimated from measurements of vehicle deformation using absorbed energy based methods. The accuracy of these estimates is highly dependent on the availability of deformation measurements for both vehicles involved in a crash. Specialized ...

This paper analyzes the effects of daylight and daylight saving time (DST) on pedestrian and motor vehicle occupant fatalities in the United States. Multivariate analyses of county level data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System for 2-week periods in 1998 and 1999 are used. Results show that full year daylight saving time would reduce pedestrian fatalities by 171 per year, or by 13% of a...

Many wheelchair users must travel in motor vehicles while seated in their wheelchairs. The safety features of seat assemblies are key to motor vehicle occupant crash protection. Seating system properties such as strength, stiffness, and energy absorbance have been shown to have significant influence on risk of submarining. This study investigated the effects of wheelchair seat stiffness and ene...

Road traffic accidents are responsible for over 3000 deaths per year in the UK, according to Department for Transport (2004a) figures. Although progress is being made in a number of areas, vehicle occupant fatalities have not been falling in line with casualty reduction targets for the year 2010. A sample of 1185 fatal vehicle occupant cases was considered, from ten UK police forces, from the y...

A cooperative research project with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) was conducted to evaluate the capability of a Tubular Thoracic Cushion (TTC) airbag concept to significantly reduce rib deflections for the SID-IIs dummy in the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s (IIHS) side-impact barrier test. The concept of the TTC airbag was to efficiently distribute a major...

A new method of predicting automobile occupant posture is presented. The Cascade Prediction Model approach combines multiple independent predictions of key postural degrees of freedom with inverse kinematics guided by data-based heuristics. The new model, based on posture data collected in laboratory mockups and validated using data from actual vehicles, produces accurate posture predictions fo...

Knowledge of human presence and interaction in a vehicle is of growing interest to vehicle manufacturers for design and safety purposes. We present a framework to perform the tasks of occupant detection and occupant classification for automatic child locks and airbag suppression. It operates for all passenger seats, using a single overhead camera. A transfer learning technique is introduced to ...