Head injuries often occur in frontal accidents, which are the most frequent type of vehicle collision and causes of injuries. However, because of the limitations of biomechanical knowledge, the assesment of the protection offered by a new vehicle model is based on biomechanical criteria which are meaningless in real-world accidents. Although the use of airbags in conjunction with a belt reduces the severity of head injuries in automotive accidents, problems still remain concerning the values of the triggering threshold. A new accident reconstruction methodology has been developed to obtain a better understanding of head injury mechanisms and to propose new biomechanical criteria in the future. In this study, the new methodology is presented and used to reconstruct a typical road accident involving head injury to a restrained driver. The application of this methodology to this real-world accident allows to associate head loads and head injuries sustained by the victim.
Abstract