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The widespread implementation of air bags has increased the incidence of upper extremity injuries in the automotive crash environment. The first step in reducing these injuries is to determine applicable upper extremity injury criteria. The purpose of this paper is to develop injury risk functions for the fifth percentile female forearm, humerus, wrist, and elbow. Injury tolerance data for each anatomical region were gathered from experiments with controlled impact loading of disarticulated small female cadaver upper extremities. This technique allowed for the applied load to be directly quantified. All data were mass scaled to the fifth percentile female. In order to develop the risk functions, the logit distribution was integrated for the uncensored data, while logistic regression and generalized estimating equations statistical analysis techniques were used for censored data.

Although filter class specifications have been defined for most anthropomorphic test devices, no recommendation exists for the instrumented upper extremity. A three-part study was performed to determine the best channel filter class (CFC) to use for the instrumented upper extremity. By analyzing frequency content of signals from accelerometers and load cells, filtering data through three of the four possible CFC's to compare effects on the signals, and performing an injury comparison between cadaver data and the filtered load cell data, CFC 600 was chosen and recommended as the optimum filter class to use for upper extremity testing.

This paper presents an analysis of the displacement measurement of the Hybrid III 50th percentile male dummy chest in quasistatic and dynamic loading environments. In this dummy, the sternal chest deformation is typically characterized using a sliding chest potentiometer, originally designed to measure inward deflection in the central axis of the dummy chest. Loading environments that include other modes of deformation, such as lateral translations or rotations, can create a displacement vector that is not aligned with this sensitive axis. To demonstrate this, the dummy chest was loaded quasistatically and dynamically in a series of tests. A string potentiometer array, with the capability to monitor additional deflection modes, was used to supplement the measurement of the chest slider.