The Acceleration Severity Index (ASI) is used to evaluate the potential for occupant risk in full-scale crash tests involving roadside safety hardware. Despite its widespread use across Europe, there is a lack of research relating this metric to occupant injury in real-world collisions. Recent installation of Event Data Recorders (EDRs) in a number of late model vehicles presents a different pe...

Automobile crashes are the largest cause of death for pregnant females and the leading cause of traumatic fetal injury mortality in the United States. A previously validated MADYMO computer model of a 30-week pregnant occupant was used in this study to investigate the pregnant occupant response in a severe frontal motor vehicle crash. This study presents simulations of 26 different severe car c...

The primary consumers of building energy are heating, cooling, ventilation, and lighting systems, which maintain occupant comfort, and electronics and appliances that enable occupant functionality. The optimization of building energy is therefore a complex problem highly dependent on unique building and environmental conditions as well as on time dependent operational factors. To provide comput...

OBJECTIVE A 3-phase real-world motor vehicle crash (MVC) reconstruction method was developed to analyze injury variability as a function of precrash occupant position for 2 full-frontal Crash Injury Research and Engineering Network (CIREN) cases. METHOD Phase I: A finite element (FE) simplified vehicle model (SVM) was developed and tuned to mimic the frontal crash characteristics of the CIREN...

Efforts have been devoted to the identification of the impacts of occupant behavior on building energy consumption. Various factors influence building energy consumption at the same time, leading to the lack of precision when identifying the individual effects of occupant behavior. This paper reports the development of a new methodology for examining the influences of occupant behavior on build...

Occupant satisfaction with indoor environmental quality (IEQ) in office buildings has been positively correlated to self-estimated job performance and, potentially, to overall company productivity. LEED is a voluntary, consensus-based, market-driven program that provides third-party certification of green buildings, contributing to promote sustainability into the mainstream of building design a...

In recent years, the development of airbag system has improved the safety of the occupants. However, the car occupant can be often killed by improper airbag operation. Robust detection of vehicle occupant posture is necessary for a safer intelligent airbag deployment system. This paper presents a stereobased method of estimating the posture of the occupant. Utilizing the disparity images and th...

Many vehicle design and safety assessment applications use physical and virtual representations of vehicle occupants within the vehicle interior. Proper use of these human models requires accurate data concerning vehicle occupant posture and position. This paper presents techniques for characterizing vehicle occupant posture by measuring accessible body landmarks. The landmark locations are use...

This research compares the ability of delta-V and the occupant impact velocity (OIV), a competing measure of crash severity, to predict occupant injury in real world collisions. A majority of the analysis is performed using 191 cases with vehicle kinematics data from Event Data Recorders (EDRs) matched with detailed occupant injury information. Cumulative probability of injury risk curves are g...

The occupant impact velocity (OIV) and acceleration severity index (ASI) are competing measures of crash severity used to assess occupant injury risk in full-scale crash tests involving roadside safety hardware, e.g. guardrail. Delta-V, or the maximum change in vehicle velocity, is the traditional metric of crash severity for real world crashes. This study compares the ability of the OIV, ASI, ...