Digital babies help Ford improve safety

This avatar, now being built by Ford using data from Chinese hospitals, is a critical step in recreating a human baby to ensure its maximum chance of survival in any vehicle accident. But this model - one of the world's first digital child crash dummies - won't take the place of traditional crash test dummies.

Ford's senior technical leader for its safety and research division, Dr Steve Rouhana, says: "We want to better understand how injuries to younger occupants may be different".

"They don't take the place of crash dummies, which measure the effect of forces on the body. Instead, they are used as a way to understand how to further improve restraint system effectiveness through better understanding of injury mechanisms."

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Making a baby in digital form is intensely complex. Ford took 11 years building an adult version and committing it to the computer. Ford's task, announced this week, is to build a digital human model of a child with more lifelike re-creations of the skeletal structure, internal organs and brain.

The model for the avatar comes from child MRIs to allow better a understanding of how crash forces affect children and adults differently. "We study injury trends in the field, and we know that traffic crashes are the leading cause of death for people from age one to 34," says Dr Rouhana.

"Our restraint systems are developed to help reduce serious injuries and fatalities in the field, and they have proven to be very effective. But crash injuries still occur. The more you know about the human body, the more we can consider how to make our restraint systems even better."

He says that building the model of a person is just like building a model of a car. "You start with your surface geometry for each component and any subcomponent it contains - in this case the geometry of the human body and its internal organs."

Ford admits that child data are not as extensively available as adults. It has contracted into a one-year agreement with Tianjin University of Science and Technology, which is working with Tianjin Children's Hospital, to obtain child geometry and basic body information from sources like MRIs and CAT scans provided by volunteers.

Ford says, in a statement, that Tianjin is one of the largest cities in China, close to the capital of Beijing. "All other information for the project will be obtained from public domain literature," it says.