J0240106 筋制御法を用いた低速後突時の頭頚部挙動予測

Abstract

Whiplash injury with neck pain is the most frequent injury due to low-speed rear-end impacts in Japan, but the injury mechanism is still unknown. Some researchers proposed their hypotheses for the injury mechanisms from their studies based on Post Mortem Human Subject (PMHS) tests, volunteer tests, and computer simulations using human body finite element (FE) models. Although the human body FE models are useful to evaluate the hypotheses, the active muscles should be modeled and integrated with a human body FE model to investigate the injury mechanism in real-world accidents. In this study, we developed a human body FE model with active muscles and a muscle controller for posture maintenance. The model was used under a rear impact condition with 8 km/h, and reproduced the same head-neck responses as the volunteer test data. The human body FE model with the muscle controller have the potential to investigate damages due to elongations of neck muscles during low-speed rear-end impacts.