Estimating shoulder injury risk using low rate lateral impacts to dummies

This paper is an investigation of low rate loading of the shoulder. The paper first presents a review of the literature on the impact tolerance of the shoulder in high and low rate loading conditions. Currently, there are no injury criteria, nor biofidelic anthropomorphic test dummies for these low rate scenarios. This study investigates dummy loading situations that are known to be non-injurious using both the 5th percentile female and 50th percentile male Hybrid III ATDs. Correlating the non-injurious loading conditions outlined in the literature with ATD tests provides a methodology for relating dummy impact forces as they pertain to human lateral shoulder impact loads. The differences in the human shoulder response and the dummy shoulder response will be resolved through the relationships established with similar loading methods. The ATD tests are compared to a previous testing methodology, resulting in a relationship between non-injurious shoulder loads of the human and the corresponding impact loads of the ATD.