My colleagues and I presented two papers at the IRCOBI conference in Athens. Dr. Jingwen Hu presented an evaluation of a novel four-point belt system that shows considerable promise for improving occupant protection in oblique frontal crashes. In these crashes, even a belted occupant tends to slide off the airbag, risking potentially injurious head contacts with the interior. The four-point belt concept allows the load limits on the two shoulder belts to be independently varied, producing better kinematic control of the torso and reducing head excursions while also limiting chest deflection.
I presented an overview of methods our group has developed to track vehicle occupant head position and orientation during abrupt vehicle maneuvers. This effort has been led by Dr. Daniel Park, who developed a model-based tracking system using a single Microsoft Kinect time-of-flight depth camera. This highly efficient data collection methodology allowed us to test a much larger number of subjects than any previous study of vehicle occupant movements during typical pre-crash vehicle maneuvers.
