Biomechanics of Real Child Pedestrian Accidents

An optimisation of the vehicle exterior with regard to the pedestrian accident is only sensible with a view of the main groups of pedestrians. Contrary to dummy tests, of which advantages as well as disadvantages are sufficiently known, the correlation of dummy versus living human body versus dead tissue is eliminated in the analysis of real accidents, but gets extended by the parameter of age. Compared with laboratory tests, this method suffers from the disadvantage of middle errors in the estimated initial data, for instance the collision speed of the vehicle, which vary with every accident.

Based on 230 medically and technically thoroughly worked out single-case analyses of real pedestrian accidents, including 128 accidents involving children, the influence of various parameters of vehicles and traffic participants on kinematics, injury mechanisms, and traumatising of the pedestrian accident are outlined. The main effort lies in the analysis of the biggest main-group--the child pedestrians, who are marked by pronounced differences in size and proportion as well as special mechanical strength of their bodies.