HOW INJURY CRITERIA CORRELATE WITH THE INJURY RISK - A STUDY ANALYSING DIFFERENT PARAMETERS WITH RESPECT TO WHIPLASH INJURY

This study analyses the significance of different injury criteria by comparing results obtained in sled test experiments to real world accident data. Standard rear-end sled test conditions (sled velocity 16km/h, 6g trapezoidal pulse) and recent car seats were used in the tests. A BioRID and a RID 2 dummy were utilised. Various parameters including the head and neck acceleration, neck bending moments, the shear forces as well as the head-to-head restraint distance were derived from the tests. The neck injury criteria NICmax, Nkm and the rebound velocity were calculated. In a next step, the results from the sled tests were compared with the risk of neck injury as determined from an accident data base. This data base contains several thousand files collected by a major German insurance company and records technical aspects as well as medical outcome (e.g. duration of symptoms). Thus, it was possible to specifically assign the neck injury risk to a certain seat tested in the sled tests. Finally, the correlation of the injury risk with several of the parameters obtained from the sled tests is presented. It was observed that for the BioRID, the Nea component of the Nkm correlated best. Although for the NICmax a trend of increasing values for increasing injury risk was observed, the effect was less pronounced than for Nea. Using the RID 2, it was shown that the parameters analysed correlate in a similar fashion, but on different absolute levels. Consequently, it is recommended not to rely on a single criterion but to analyse different criteria in order to assess the protection potential of car seats in rear-end collisions. For the covering abstract see ITRD E825082.