This Research Topic is Volume II of a series. The previous volume, which has attracted over 20,000 views can be found here:
Understanding Age and Sex-Related Differences in the Biomechanics of Road Traffic Associated Injuries Through Population Diversity AnalysesAccording to the World Health Organization, road traffic crashes account for 1.35 million deaths and approximately 50 million injuries yearly. These injuries are unequally shared by the most vulnerable groups of the population. Road injuries are the leading cause of death for children and young adults (5-29 years old). Recent research has pointed out that while current in-vehicle safety measures can be effective to prevent injuries, certain population segments (women, the elderly, obese occupants) remain at greater risk. Injury prevention policies and restraint system designs have relied on experimental data which focuses primarily on mid-sized adult males, potentially resulting in a gap in knowledge of how to protect other portions of the population.
Experimental and computational research addressing these biomechanical differences is essential to guarantee that new safety measures are effective for a diverse population. Only through a deeper understanding of the influence of individual characteristics in their biomechanical response during an impact (and the potential effect on subsequent injuries) can we improve restraint systems to reduce injury risk across the population. As a first step, it is necessary to establish a solid epidemiological approach to understand the influence of these individual differences in the causation of injuries in the real world. Secondly, new experimental tests targeting how tissue material properties and the mechanical behavior of anatomical structures change with age, sex and anthropometry are needed. Last, translating the former findings into models of the human body that can be used to design and evaluate restraint systems capable of adapting to these differences among individuals, as well as characteristics of different collisions, is essential to prevent real world injuries.
Volume I of this Research Topic offered insights into the use of computer models to investigate the performance of existing and newly proposed injury criteria capable of capturing individual differences related to age and sex variations. It also provided new experimental data that can be used in the development of more accurate physical and computational surrogates. Finally, the collection included information about the development of a new physical crash test dummy intended to improve the protection of female occupants in rear impacts. We hope to build on these findings in this second volume firstly by increasing the amount of experimental data that can be used to benchmark the performance of existing dummies and computer models and even to guide the design of new surrogates. These new data could be used to develop methods so that the outcome of existing standard models (i.e. 50th percentile male) can be tailored to represent specific population groups of different age and gender. Field studies that can identify statistically significant differences between age groups and gender in injury mechanisms and/or tolerances are also essential to suggest where experimental efforts should be focused in the future. Also, papers exploring how to use Artificial Intelligence methodologies to develop probabilistic models of road users from deterministic computer models are invited to the new Volume of this Research Topic.
Among others, but not restricted to, the following topics will be welcomed:
• Change in tissue material properties with age
• Change in tissue material properties with sex and hormonal state
• Development of age-adjusted injury criteria for body regions
• Development of biofidelity reference targets and injury risk functions for various segments of the population (e.g., by age, sex, and/or anthropometry)
• Assessment of existing road injury criteria across a wide range of the population
• Epidemiological studies investigating the effects of sex, age and anthropometry on road injury outcomes and risk
• Development of personalized finite element (FE) models of the human body applied to the understanding of road injury causation and prevention
• Assessment of existing physical and computational human surrogates used in the evaluation of road safety measures
Dr. Forman is the Director of Forman Research Consulting, L.L.C.. All other Topic Editors declare no competing interests with regard to the Research Topic subject.