Grant: Operating Grant

Vehicular rollovers are a significant source of major injuries. Specifically, rollovers can cause neck injury, through head-first impact when an occupant "dives" into the roof during roof to ground impact. Rollover neck injury mechanisms are poorly understood and although cadaver studies have been used to study rollovers, they lack muscles and because rollovers take several seconds to develop, muscles are important to the spine posture during rollovers. We plan to study spine posture and neck muscles in human volunteers during simulated rollovers. We have developed techniques previously to record neck posture with x-ray movies and neck muscle activation with electromyography (small needles that are inserted into the various neck muscles to record their electrical activity). We have also done these studies in a rig that allowed us to study people that were strapped into a car seat and hung upside down. We will modify this rig so that it moves similarly to a vehicle during a rollover and use the same x-ray and electromyography techniques to study the volunteers necks during our experiments. This information will allow us to validate existing computational models of the neck during rollovers and we can use it to develop new seatbelts, roof panels and other novel safety devices to prevent these injuries from happening as frequently as they do now.