Numerical Simulation of Shoulder Lateral Impacts for Shoulder Injury Prediction

IN CAR LATERAL impacts, the shoulder is directly exposed to injuries. These lesions are rarely fatal but produce long term impairments (Frampton, 1997). To develop protection devices, numerical tools such as finite element (FE) body models are used. If the first FE body models represented average males, geometrical personalization methods are now available (Besnault, 1998; Buhmann 2003) and allow taking into account the large inter-individual variability. Actually, an average model can not be used for predicting injuries for a subject whose anthropometry differs significantly from that of a 50 percentile model. It is not common to find validated shoulder FE models (Iwamoto, 2000; Thollon, 2002), and these last models represent 50 percentile male and did not allow the prediction of fractures. Thus, the purpose of this study is to assess an upgraded version of the shoulder part of the 50 percentile male HUMOS model and to assess the ability of geometrical personalization methods to improve shoulder injury risk prediction.