Development of personalizable female and male pedestrian SAFER human body models

Abstract

Objectives

Vulnerable road users are globally overrepresented as victims of road traffic injuries. Developing biofidelic male and female pedestrian human body models (HBMs) that represent diverse anthropometries is essential to enhance road safety and propose intervention strategies.

Methods

In this study, 50th percentile male and female pedestrians of the SAFER HBM were developed via a newly developed image registration–based mesh morphing framework. The performance of the HBMs was evaluated by means of a set of cadaver experiments, involving subjects struck laterally by a generic sedan buck.

Results

In simulated whole-body pedestrian collisions, the personalized HBMs effectively replicate trajectories of the head and lower body regions, as well as head kinematics, in lateral impacts. The results also demonstrate the personalization framework’s capacity to generate personalized HBMs with reliable mesh quality, ensuring robust simulations.

Conclusions

The presented pedestrian HBMs and personalization framework provide robust means to reconstruct and evaluate head impacts in pedestrian-to-vehicle collisions thoroughly and accurately.

Keywords:

• Human body model
• pedestrian protection
• morphing
• impact biomechanics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

All data relevant to the study are included in the article or uploaded as supplementary information.

Additional information

Funding

This study was partly financed by the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems (Vinnova, No. 2019-03386) and the Swedish Research Council (VR, Nos. 2020-04724 and 2020-04496). The computations were enabled by resources provided by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC), partially funded by the Swedish Research Council (No. 2018-05973).