Head injuries in snow sport and motorcycle accidents

Head injuries are common in skiing and motorcycling at both the recreation and elite levels. These types of injuries can lead to serious health consequences for victims. Therefore, it is inevitable to improve protection system for people and athletes against head injuries in accidents. The particular research interest is the investigation of head injuries in snow sport and motorcycle accidents.

In order to make a reliable model, some controlled head impact tests have been conducted (figure 1). To validate snow impact model, experiments has been done in laboratory and results of impact tests and finite element models compared to each other (figure 2).

For next steps, real accidents will be constructed and the relationship between head impact conditions and brain injury will be investigated.

Case data for motorcycle collisions and snow sports accidents will be analyzed by a multidisciplinary team. The accident records and video footage, when available, will be used for accident reconstructions with rigid body and finite element models of the human head and body. After verification of numerical models, they can predict various conditions.

This PhD project is part of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovation Training Network (European Union’s Horizon 2020 grant agreement No. 642662) HEADS (Head protection: a European training network for Advanced Designs in Safety)

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Contacts

In collaboration with:

HEADS is a consortium with six partners, three industry and three academic, across five countries, who are already involved in EU COST Actions and CEN, ASTM and ISO Standards activities in working towards new helmet standards incorporating oblique impacts: KU Leuven (Belgium), KTH (Sweden), University College Dublin (Ireland), Charles Owen (UK), AGV (Italy) and Lazer Sport (Belgium).

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement.