"On shelves at a Humanetics facility in Huron, Ohio, skulls stare from their eyeless sockets, shiny and silver. Around a corner, a rack is filled with squishy, peach-toned arms, legs, torsos and butts. "Everything we do has to be pretty human-like," says manufacturing engineering manager Jonathan Keck, "so we tend to have some very unique parts." Humanetics is the leading manufacturer of automotive crash test dummies the humanoid devices that are buckled into cars for safety tests to gather data on what would happen to a real person in a crash."
"It's not important that they look human in fact, the latest, top-of-the-line designs actually look less realistic, with smooth, flat faces instead of noses, eye sockets and lips. But it's absolutely essential that they move like a real body would, and record the forces a body would experience. That means a head that weighs what a human head would weigh, moving on a neck that's about as bendy as a real neck."
Humanetics produces crash test dummies whose parts are crafted to replicate human mass, joint behavior, and force responses in collisions. Visual realism is secondary to biomechanical fidelity, with modern faces often simplified while heads, necks and joints are tuned to match human movement. Design inputs include datasets from living subjects and cadaver crash tests to ensure accurate force measurement. A new female-specific dummy is based on female anatomical and biomechanical data rather than being a modified male model. Advocates argue that prior reliance on male-based dummies contributed to higher injury rates among women in crashes.
Read at www.npr.org
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