Development of injury risk functions for use with the THORAX Demonstrator; an updated THOR

Paper in proceeding, 2014

The thorax‐shoulder complex of the THOR dummy was updated in the EU‐project THORAX. The new dummy, the THORA demonstrator, was evaluated in several biomechanical test conditions. In this study, selected data from these tests and injury information from the original tests with Post Mortem Human Subjects were used to develop injury risk functions in accordance with the guidelines defined within ISO/TC22/SC12/WG6. This included the use of survival analysis, distribution and quality assessments. The results include draft injury risk functions for three THORAX injury criteria intended for frontal and oblique loading. The maximum peak deflection measurement (Dmax) and a new differential deflection criterion (DcTHOR) were found to have a good injury risk quality index. Furthermore, a new local strain‐based concept, denoted Number of Fractured Ribs (NFR), appeared to be a potentially useful injury criterion as by its nature it is less sensitive to restraint conditions than deflection measures although it had a lower quality index compared with the displacement‐based criteria.