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Sled Laboratory for Automotive Safety and Rehabilitation Biomechanics
The Sled Lab, led by Valentina Graci, PhD, studies human movement and associated forces and accelerations in scenarios relevant for injury and rehabilitation from injury. A primary research focus is the influence of automotive restraints (e.g. seat belts), vehicle seating, and advanced in-vehicle technology on human movement with an emphasis on age- and sex-based differences.
Research in the Sled Lab has received support from the automotive industry, including Autoliv Inc. and Toyota Motor Corporation, as well as from nonprofit organizations such as the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the National Institutes of Health, and the automotive industry-supported Center for Child Injury and Prevention Studies at CHOP and The Ohio State University.
Lab Life Video Series: The Sled Lab
Step into the Sled Lab for Automotive Safety and Rehabilitation Biomechanics at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, the only biomechanics lab conducting automotive safety research at a pediatric hospital in the country.
Research Highlights
- The Sled Lab pioneered the first comparative analysis of automatic emergency braking (AEB) acceleration pulses in the modern fleet. They found that AEB differs among vehicles and different acceleration profiles associated with the braking may potentially lead to varied out-of-position occupant postures among both children and adults.
- The Sled Lab team are the first and only group to design an AEB rotational sled able to reproduce different types of AEB pulses in an efficient laboratory space. The new AEB sled is used for human volunteer testing to understand the effect of AEB on occupants of any age and sex.
- Pre-pretensioner seat belts are designed to remove the slack of the belt during a crash avoidance maneuver to keep the occupants from being displaced out of the optimal position within the seat belt. The Sled Lab found that pre-pretensioner belts are also effective in repositioning forward-leaning adult and booster-seated child occupants prior to a crash to a more optimal posture for protection.
- Vehicles with autonomous driving features will allow occupants to assume non-standard seating positions. Dr. Graci's group was the first to physically test the effect of reclined seating on booster-seated child vehicle occupants – both in the Sled Lab with volunteers and at crash speeds with crash test dummies in a crash test lab. They found that booster seats can be beneficial when seated in a reclined position to minimize forces on the abdomen but may lead to higher forces in the lumbar spine.
Leader
