COMPARISON OF HEAD-NECK KINEMATICS BETWEEN ISOLATED FINITE ELEMENT (FE) HEAD-NECK MODEL AND FULL-BODY MODEL IN LOW SEVERITY REAR-END IMPACT

Paper in proceeding, 2023

The objective of the present study was to analyze whether the kinematics of an isolated head-neck model can replicate those observed on a whole body model in order to reduce simulation time in development or optimization tasks. Previous studies have shown how muscle controllers improved head-neck kinematics responses over a passive neck muscle implementation. These studies used volunteer T1 displacement time histories prescribed on the model T1 as the loading input to develop the neck controller characteristics. It was not clear whether the implementation of a controller based on volunteer kinematics with an isolated head-neck model was directly transferable to a full-body model. The current study shows that the head-neck model produced almost identical responses as the full body model for the first 200ms of the event for most kinematic variables. The head rotational displacement corresponded well during the first 150ms. The isolated head-neck model predicted more displacement and rotations than when mounted on a full-body model. The current simplification of a head-neck model still produced reasonable kinematic responses during the critical time period to assess soft tissue neck injuries, making it suitable for developing and tuning neck muscle controllers.