Human Volunteer Head-Neck Response in Frontal Flexion: A New Analysis

Abstract

<div class="htmlview paragraph">At the Naval BioDynamics Laboratory (NBDL) in New Orleans a large series of human volunteer experiments has been conducted by Ewing and Thomas [<span class="xref">1</span>]<span class="xref">*</span> to determine the dynamic head-neck response. From a number of these experiments Wismans et al. [<span class="xref">2</span>] determined omni-directional dummy head-neck performance requirements relative to a non-rotated T1 coordinate system (i.e. the head motions incorporate the influence of the thoracic column flexibility). In 1987, the frontal volunteer head-neck response was compared with the response of postmortem human subject (PMHS) experiments [<span class="xref">3</span>]. One of the findings was that the volunteer T1 rotations differ significantly from the PMHS T1 rotations which was explained by measurement “errors” in the T1 instrumentation. The present paper is an extension of the previous work [<span class="xref">2</span>,<span class="xref">3</span>].</div> <div class="htmlview paragraph">A detailed analysis of the high-speed films revealed that the volunteer T1 instrumentation mount was not firmly mounted to the spine. In the present analysis a T1 correction is applied to the experiments used in the previous analyses. A description of the correction methodology will be presented. The objective of the present study is to correct for the errors in the T1 rotations and to develop a set of new performance requirements which are expressed relative to a rotated T1 coordinate system. New requirements will be presented and compared with previous analyses. Additionally, the dynamic response of the Hybrid III dummy neck will be evaluated on the basis of the new performance requirements.</div>