Many wheelchair users must travel in motor vehicles while seated in their wheelchairs. The safety features of seat assemblies are key to motor vehicle occupant crash protection. Seating system properties such as strength, stiffness, and energy absorbance have been shown to have significant influence on risk of submarining. This study investigated the effects of wheelchair seat stiffness and ene...

road traffic crashes (rtcs) account for great mortality and morbidity rates worldwide, resulting in substantial global burden. factors contributing to rtc generally fall into three categories: environmental, vehicle, and human, with the human factor being by far the leading determinant. obtaining an in-depth exploration of driving behavior and factors underpinning risky driving could be of part...

The objective of this study was to evaluate the performance of various configurations of a driver restraint system by using a combined injury criteria index and making the restraint system adaptive to different frontal crash coinditions, such as severity of the crash, belt use, sitting position, pre-impact braking and size of the driver. For this purpose, a mathematical model of a driver restra...

The purpose of this paper is to present the crash exposure patterns of pregnant occupants and to evaluate the effectiveness of restraint systems, including four-point seatbelts, in far side crashes. The NASS CDS database revealed that 53.0 % of pregnant occupants are exposed to frontal crashes while 13.5 % are exposed to far side impacts. Given that far side crashes were the second leading cras...

In Europe, emphasis is being transferred from injury prevention to accident prevention to reduce road casualties. This study attempted to identify the current potential for serious casualty reduction using passive safety by examining the crash performance of new cars with seriously injured occupants. The Co-operative Crash Injury Study conducts in-depth investigations of around 1200 vehicles pe...

Children with disabilities are transported on a daily basis to schools and developmental facilities. When they travel, they often remain seated in their wheelchairs in vehicles. To study injury risk of pediatric wheelchair users in motor vehicle crashes, three of the same pediatric manual wheelchairs were sled impact tested with a seated Hybrid III 6-year-old ATD using a 20 g/48 km/h frontal cr...

Frontal crashes can be classified as full, offset, or small overlap impacts. Although the former two impacts have received considerable attention in crashworthiness and promulgation of worldwide standards, small overlap crashes have undergone limited analyses from field and laboratory investigation perspectives. The objective of the present study was to analyze small overlap impacts using data ...

This paper details the injuries occurring in real world trip-over only rollover crashes, for seat belted and contained occupants, and assesses whether these injuries can be replicated using a Jordan Rollover System (JRS) crash test rig recently installed at Crashlab in Sydney. This research forms part of the Dynamic Rollover Occupant Protection (DROP) project funded by the Australian Research C...

Traffic Safety Administration, in the interest of information exchange. The opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Department of Transportation or the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The United States Government assumes no liability for its contents or use thereof. If trade names, manufacturers'...

The Hybrid III, which is the only universally used frontal crash anthropomorphic test device, lacks a biofidelic abdomen that can be used for different loading surfaces and loading rates. The Frangible Abdomen, developed by General Motors in 1989, is the only commercially available, dynamically tuned insert. While the Frangible Abdomen has biofidelity under belt loading conditions, it has neith...