An Analytical Study of BMI Effects on Obese Senior Females in Vehicle Frontal Impact

Prior works showed that elderly females are a vulnerable segment of the population that needs special attention for their safety in traffic accidents. To study the injury performance of this vulnerable group in motor vehicle crashes (MVCs), a finite element model was developed to represent the full body of 70-year-old regular sized female. However, this model did not take the variations in size and shape among this group of people into account. In this study, an adaptive radial basis functions (RBF) methodology is developed to rapidly morph the baseline model to the target models defined by the statistical models of external body surface and the exterior ribcage. High speed frontal crash simulations are subsequently performed to investigate the effects of BMI on impact injuries. The results show that obese senior female occupants sustained higher risks of thorax, femur and head injuries than that of regular sized occupants. While BMI has no linear effect on head and thorax injury.