Professor Spyros Masouros, Imperial College London

Motor-vehicle collision-related trauma is a leading cause of death and disability worldwide. These injuries, however, are preventable. We aim to improve injury prevention, aligning with the EU’s goal of zero fatalities and serious injuries on roads by 2050.  
 
Passive safety systems, such as seatbelts and airbags, are an effective means to prevent injury in motor-vehicle collisions. Their efficacy depends on the tools used to evaluate them. Technology has helped enormously in improving safety to date, but vehicles and road behaviour are ever changing, injuries to some areas of the body remain high, and worldwide equity in safety has not been a focus. 
 
In this project we will deliver new data and assessment tools for evaluating safety systems that inform regulation and ratings, with equity being a key consideration. The specific objectives are to:  
 

• characterise critical human tissue response under load and implement in human body models (HBMs) to predict injury and evaluate safety systems; 

• produce experimental data on injury tolerance and how safety systems interact with the body, and use them to improve the predictive ability of HBMs; 

• using clinical data, generate, for the first time, a correlation between the clinical outcomes of extremity injury due to motor-vehicle collisions with a measurement in HBMs.