FORENSIC INJURY BIOMECHANICS METHODOLOGIES APPLIED TO TRAFFIC ACCIDENT RECONSTRUCTION

Abstract

Every year about 1.2 million persons die and more than 50 million are injured in road accidents. Reconstruction of traffic accident plays an important role for the investigation of the causes of such events. Nowadays modern computational techniques can be applied for the determination of the dynamic conditions of the accident, such as the the speed or the maneuvers. Forensic injury biomechanics is a current topic of research (Hayes 2007, Freeman 2010, Guo, 2008, Motherway, 2009) and can be applied successfully especially for the reconstruction of accidents involving vulnerable road users (or vehicle occupants not using the retention systems such as the seat belt or even motorcyclists not using the helmet. Since there is a direct effect between the use of safety systems and injuries, the development and use of anthropomorphic computational dummies plays and important role to the answer to some legal forensic questions related with not only the dynamics of the accident but also about the use of the retention systems. The correlation between injuries and biomechanical criteria is crucial to the determination of the causes of some accidents such as pedestrian impacts where the speed of the vehicle and the impact point location can be determined from the injuries. Such computational models are under development and forensic biomechanics is an area where knowledge from engineering and medicine should be interconnected. In addition, commercial software for accident reconstruction PC-Crash (Figure 1) is used for real world accident where the presented methodologies are applied. The characterization of the level and typical location of injuries sustained by the victims allows, on one hand, to perform a more accurate reconstruction of the accident. Also the importance of parameters such as speed, which depends on the impact’s severity, as well as the use of helmet, are related with the injuries illustrating the importance of such methodologies that correlates accident dynamics with injuries, that is very important because usually drivers lie about the speed and impact points and fatal victims cannot give their statement. Figure 1: Accident reconstitution Scenario and