Cappon 1 WHIPLASH INJURIES, NOT ONLY A PROBLEM IN REAR-END IMPACT

Even though the risk of whiplash injury is the highest in rear-end impact, there is an increased focus on frontal and frontal-oblique impact during recent years. The amount of injuries in these directions may be larger than in rear-end impact. Therefore, a European project was initiated to investigate causes and countermeasures in this area, as was previously done for rear-end impact. Accident studies showed that the amount whiplash cases was generally higher in frontal impact compared to rear-end. In all impact directions, the injury risk for female occupants was about twice the risk of male occupants. Given these results, there is a need for occupant protection against whiplash in frontal impact as well. Since there is no omni-directional whiplash dummy on the market, one of the aims was also to develop such a device. As a start several existing dummies, like THOR, Hybrid III, BioRID and RID2 were evaluated for this purpose. So far none of these dummies seemed fit to handle all the directions wished. The first start of more detailed development was to obtain typical human responses with human volunteers and Post Mortem Human Subjects. These tests will then be used for the whiplash dummy evaluation. Future work will concentrate on dummy development and evaluation, test methods and evaluation of seats available on the European market and the definition of seat parameters, which could reduce whiplash injury risk