A study of free-fall accidents and resulting injuries was conducted to determine how useful these types of data could be in establishing human injury tolerance limits. "Tolerance" was examined primarily for children and at two levels - reversible injury and threat to survival. The specific objectives were to investigate specific free-falls in sufficient depth to permit biomedical or mathematical reconstruction of the fall, simulate selected free-falls to estimate impact response, and compare predicted responses with observed injuries as a means of estimating human tolerance levels. The combination of in-depth on-site investigation and computer simulation of representative cases was found to be an effective method of studying impact injury tolerance.
Samenvatting