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-   -   Researchers create world's first female crash test dummy (https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/road-safety/259052-researchers-create-worlds-first-female-crash-test-dummy.html)

According to media reports, Swedish researchers have created the world's first female crash test dummy. This new crash dummy aims to better represent the female body and how it responds to crashes.

Reports suggest that till now, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) used a scaled-down version of a male dummy to test how women respond to crashes. This came in the form of a 4-foot 11-inch dummy weighing 108 pounds (49 kg), which is roughly the size of a 12-year-old girl and represents the smallest 5 per cent of women.



The new female crash dummy, however, measures 5 foot 3 inches and weighs about 137 pounds (62 kg). Researchers have also emphasised the dummy's chest shape and gave it a lower joint stiffness compared to its male counterpart. The dummy also comes equipped with sensors to measure the force exerted on the body during a car crash.

The team specifically tests for low severity rear impact collisions, as in this kind of crash, women have a higher risk of whiplash than men.

Astrid Linder, Director of Traffic Safety at the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute, stated that females are shorter and lighter on average than men and have different muscle strengths. Hence, they physically respond differently in a car crash. She added that her research could help identify the seats that have the best protection for both men and women. It can also help shape the way cars are specified in the future.

Reports state that currently there is no legal requirement for rear-impact collision tests to be carried out on anything other than a male dummy. However, some car companies are using them in their own safety tests, although they are not yet used in regulatory tests in the EU & the US.

Source: BBC News

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Nice to hear this. I laud this not only because it will help make our cars safer for women but also because it represents the right line of thinking where interface between technology and diversity goes. This lack of diversity has shown up in face recognition software which are geared for Caucasian features and give the wrong answers for features of other races to the detriment of African-Americans.

We humans tend to passionately believe that the sub-set we belong to, especially if it is a dominant sub-set, is the only one that counts - males, upper caste, the wealthy, whites, - we see this all over all the time. Assuming that the female body reacts to an accident like a male body is an offshoot of this. Similarly as this forum of ours is dominated by young, well-off Indian men the chances of the readership of this thread crossing 5000 is close to nil!!

Great news and this was something that has been demanded for a long time as statistics show that women are at a greater risk of injury and death in a car crash.

Another point which isn't spoken about much is that even the male dummy is based on an average American (5ft, 9 inches in height & 77kgs in weight). I think all of Asia, India included definitely have lower average heights and hence these differences are not factored into crash testing.

I have had the pleasure of visiting a crash test facility and seeing these dummies up close and they really are a work of art. The way they are constructed, especially the vertebrae and the neck with a million sensors is seriously amazing. The child dummies are even more impressive and was told are more expensive than the already expensive adult dummies !

For crash testing, I think there is only one company - Humanetics that makes these dummies and this female dummy looks like it has been designed by someone else, so I hope it is able to be taken up and sees the light of day.

Somewhere I believe this is only to dilute the result/effect of severity of crash test.

Just because a relatively shorter, lighter dummy would be easier to protect, doesn't mean the car safety results are relevant for all women.

Also hope "ideal" woman body dummy is based on what doctors said, and not simply based on what fashion magazines depict.

I hope they go one step further, and come up with a dummy to represent a pregnant woman.

From my experience, I think putting on a seatbelt, especially in advanced stages is a scary chore, the fear of the belt around the abdomen.
Perhaps this might lead to a more better design of seat belts.

Your reaction is surprising. A smaller lighter body is likely in many circumstances to be more damaged than a heavier stronger one. Think of Muhammed Ali punching you or me in the stomach versus punching Joe Frazier in the stomach - who is likely to suffer more damage? In some other circumstances a bigger body might get more exposed to damage than a much smaller one.

+1

I would doubt that. In fact the opposite might be true.
I'm not sure how the ratings will consider the impact of the specific dummy being used, but I would think that it will required safetly systems to be designed slightly different to confer proper protection for both genders.

About time!

You would be surprised how often males only are used as a reference. Not just in case of these test dummies, but in all sorts of other research. Even medical research and practices are often based on male bodies, symptoms and responses to treatment.

A good example is the simple heart attack. It’s symptoms for women are very different than for men. It wasn’t until quite recently that was not understood. All research had been done on males, so women were often misdiagnosed. Even today if you google symptoms heart attack you might well end up with descriptions on male only.

But to stick to cars, the same problem arises for how seats are modellen.

The list is sheer endless.

Jeroen

Like the seats have memory function for different drivers, a selection for the pre-tension etc for men and women in the seat would be of great value. The purpose of these models and tests is arrive at the suitable setting for both active and passive protection tech. If someone can find an operating design that works for both, since there is specific data on women now it would be good. Else a setting toggle-able by the driver would be good tech put to good use.

This is great news - when I first met my partner she disabused me quickly of the notion that car crash safety testing wasn't biased at all. I had no idea, not that I'd even thought of the fact that the averages around which typical safety testing and ergonomics are set up, almost always was for the average human male. I can never look at ergonomics the same way again - I've seen women have to push their seats far forward or use booster cushions etc, not to mention the obvious safety drawbacks that brings.
Hopefully this isn't too little too late and we start having truly egalitarian safety and ergonomic considerations in cars - you want to have women feel less compromised when adjusting to design choices in vehicles.
Fingers crossed regulators start moving in this direction too.

I think the smaller body will get more adversely affected than a larger body by the airbag deployment only. This is the reason why children under the age of 12 are prohibited from sitting on the front seats. To address the issue of the airbags making smaller people more "uncomfortable", the airbags' intensity could get worked upon to be made to match the mass of the one sitting on the seat by adding a few more detonators firing a set of explosives instead of one whole unit to lower the impact on lighter bodied folks. This would be worth trying if there is a solid statistic supporting women getting severely affected by the intensity of airbag deployments which is not existing at all.

Airbags become useless after the first "well placed" impact. If the impact happens at a point beyond the sensors, they don't work. After the first impact, the subsequent slides, collisions, rollovers, falls, etc., rely on the body shell and seat belt to increase the chances of survival.

This is a pointless venture aimed at placating a crowd which is largely advocating against personal transport in the first place. To find a solution, we need a problem. Was lack of dummies of one's size a problem? Not at all!. True "progressives", who believe men and women to have no difference at all(no joke, it is the current trend), must have raised pitchforks at it, if there was any logic behind their logic in the last decade. This news exposes the biased nature of their notion of "equality". Will the swedes be gunning for the tests to be conducted separately for body shapes of severely underweight bulimics, severely obese obesity promoting "body positive" folks and all those are in between the extremes?

There are so many regressive thoughts and misogyny in this forum which is perhaps demographically full of educated cream of the crop. I worry about where we stand. And where we are headed.

Literally tonnes and tonnes of data is available from as far back as the 1980s!




etc etc. Source:

https://www.consumerreports.org/car-...ivers-at-risk/

You can try and derail the discussion on the relevance of this topic by throwing in the exceptions. But the world is roughly split in 50/50 men/women. So taking the body characteristics of the total population, rather than half the population into account seems like a good approach to me.

If anything this is a good example how male biased our society tends to be. Even when there is overwhelming scientific evidence that women (i.e. 50% of the world population) gets the short end of the stick. It takes decades before any action is undertaken!


Jeroen

Sir I'll stay with facts and data and you can stay with your views thank you. Is there any harm in trying out a dummy shaped, weighted and reconfigured like a women's body? Does it cause any harm? At the most it will show there is no difference at best it will show what differences are there that need addressing. You, it seems to me, are mixing up your bitterness against liberals with a strictly medical study. Let me share an example - cervical cancer is the 4th largest cancer killer amongst women while in men it doesn't register as a major killer at all. Because it did not affect men in significant numbers adequate budgets to research treatment for it were not being allocated in USA till the 1980s - why because budget allocations were done by folks at senior levels who were all men. I could give you half a dozen more medical examples. Let's table facts not our pet prejudices which I'm sure each of us has plenty of.

+1,+1

Funny that we should get comments like these in what is supposed to be a non-controversial and common-sense drive initiative.

I won't go into the data since Jeroen and Narayan have already explained that but your argument is in itself a self-serving one where you claim "progressives" believe in something which you clearly don't believe in but then go ahead and use that as a basis of your argument. It's fine if you decide to be blind towards real issues and biases that women face when it comes to research, healthcare etc but its a whole other predicament when people deride such initiatives to address these issues. Why is it that even the most basic venture to accommodate women threatening us men? Something I always like to tell fellow men - ‘When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression’.

This is not about placating a crowd, this is about ensuring that safety of 50% of humanity. If you feel that ensuring the safety of women is placation, I'm afraid this is a worthless argument.