Crash Test Geniuses
Accidental injury is a leading cause of hospitalizations and fatalities in Canada and around the world. Although the number of fatalities due to traffic accidents has decreased in many developed countries, it is still significant.
A key challenge to improving the safety of vehicle occupants is that to prevent and accurately assess injury, we need to run tests on people that are likely to cause injury—which is clearly not possible. To overcome this limitation, computational human body models have been developed that can provide detailed insights into tissue-level response.
Dr. Duane Cronin, Canada Research Chair in Trauma Biomechanics and Injury Prevention, is developing human body computational models to understand and prevent injury in crash scenarios. These models are frangible (they can sustain damage just as human tissue would) and biofidelic (they respond similarly to humans).
Cronin’s long-term goal is to develop, validate and apply advanced computational human body models to investigate impact response and injury mechanisms and generate new approaches to mitigating injury from vehicle collisions. He and his research team will accomplish this by advancing human models to predict injury from impact scenarios; developing novel “aged” models to better study the at-risk aging population; and fully integrating human models in vehicle crash scenarios to increase our understanding of injury mechanisms.
Ultimately, their research will improve predictive human models to reduce injury and save lives.