Newswise — His bare buttocks rest on the cold steel shelf. His smooth, hairless skin has a ghastly pinkish-orange hue. His toeless feet lie nearby, alongside his head, rib cage, arms, hands, and legs. Could this be the grisly scene of some ritualistic slaying?
Not quite. A white-coated technician enters the room and transports the body parts to a wooden workbench. He takes an Allen wrench and screws the feet to the legs, the hands to the arms, and then the limbs and head to the torso. When he's finished, another Hybrid III midsize adult male anthropomorphic test device has begun to come to life. Or at least what passes for life for a crash-test dummy.
During the summer, IEEE Spectrum visited Denton ATD, a Rochester Hills, Mich., company that is one of the world's leading makers of crash-test dummies. In an article in the October 2007 issue of Spectrum, Associate Editor Erico Guizzo describes how Denton makes its sensor-packed dummies, from the fabrication of steel and vinyl parts to assembly of the dummies to the gruesome tests they endure.
Crash-test dummies work as human surrogates that simulate how a person's body would respond in a car crash and help ensure that a new car's seat belts, air bags, head- and armrests, structural frame, interior padding, and other elements provide good protection.
Dummies are strapped in brand-new cars and endure a torturous range of injury and insult: head-on collisions, rollovers, rear and side crashes--all to certify that the carmaker's vehicles can protect their human occupants in the event of an accident.
What will the dummies of the future look like? Denton has two examples to show. One is RibEye, a torso in which each rib is equipped with an LED, and two light-angle sensors are mounted on the spine; the sensors track the position of each LED in all three dimensions and reveal how the ribs behave during a crash.
The second example is FOCUS (facial and ocular countermeasure for safety headform), an enhanced face with eyeballs and bones equipped with sensors. The U.S. Army plans to use FOCUS to evaluate protective gear. It could also be used to study airbag and sports injuries. Oh, and popping corks. Turns out corks account for about 10 percent of eye-related hospital admissions in Europe.
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