The biomechanics of injury and prevention

Abstract

The biomechanics of injury and prevention is an important branch of modern biomechanics and a multi-disciplinary subject that is applied to the analysis of the mechanism of biological tissue or organ damage and its prevention. The goal of it is to prevent the human body from damage or minimize injury for tissue or organ when subjected to loads. It covers the study of the response of tissue subjected load, the mechanism and the tolerance of injury, and the methods and effective devices to reduce injury. Higher loads have high lethality due to its short-term action and explosiveness. Therefore, the ability to anti-injury under overload has been a severe constraint for the development of aircraft, the improvement of automobile performance and the enhancement of athletes' competitive ability. In particular, the emergence of the modern faster and more flexible fighter, the life-saving of supersonic ejection and the protective of maneuver flight of high load and load has presented new challenges for the subject of injury and prevention biomechanics but also provided enormous opportunities for the development of it. In recent years, the impact injury involved in aerospace, traffic accidents, sports and falls of the elder has presented the features of high incidence and low protection efficiency. However, it is difficult to obtain the actual data due to the damage caused by experiments to humans. Meanwhile, since the biological tissue has the characteristics of nonlinearity, viscoelasticity, regeneration and reconstruction, it involves how to describe the constitutive relations of biological tissue or organs, and the correlation between the anatomical features and its mechanical properties accurately. It also involves how to establish the mechanism and tolerance of tissue injury at multi-scales, the methods and the principle to design protective devices. The present paper focuses on the summarization of the major research contents and its methods to the biomechanics of injury and prevention. The types, mechanisms (including the response of the biomechanics and mechanobiology), tolerance, and the protective method of injury under complex loading for the human body are summarized, and the primary advancement and the possible tendency of development in these fields are introduced. The study on the biomechanics of injury and prevention is of great significance to protect and improve human safety under complex load. It could guide the establishment of standards and evaluation methods of musculoskeletal injuries involved in aerospace, transportation, and sports. This research is vital to guide the optimization design of protective devices and has great potential to the development and application of bionic engineering materials and protective devices.