Stapp Car Crash Conference: Subject-Specific Validation of Parametric Human Body Models

Dr. Eunjoo Hwang, who recently completed a post-doc fellowship in our group at UMTRI, presented a paper at the Stapp Car Crash Conference this month. This is the most in-depth effort to date to validate parametric finite-element human body models (HBM) by subject-specific comparisons to data from impact tests with post-mortem human subjects (PMHS). Previously, the responses of HBMs have been compared to corridors developed for physical crash test dummies. These corridors have been developed by scaling of PMHS responses (and some low-speed human volunteer test data) to target specific body sizes. But parametric HBM can generate a wide range of body shapes and sizes. Validating this methodology requires comparison to individual subject tests, with the model configured to match the specimen geometry as closely as possible. Although much more work remains to be done in this domain, the results showed clearly that subject-specific models match test data better than naively scaled models.