Anthropomorphic test devices (ATDs), better know as crash test dummies, are used to asses the risk of injury in motor-vehicle collisions. They are full-scale replicas of humans that record acceleration and loads during biomechanical testing. Ongoing research is conducted on ATDs to improve their design, test their biofidelity and understand the significance of their output data.
The goal of the ATD research at Duke University?s Injury and Orthopaedic Biomechanics Laboratory is to evaluate the biofidelity of both the Hybrid III (the current government sanctioned ATD design) an the THOR-NT (the next generation ATD design) dummy necks in quasistatic tension and bending. This is achieved by comparing the mechanical responses of both the ATDs with the results from human cadaver testing and with results from computational models of the living human neck. Each ATD is tested using a variety of mechanical end-conditions to quantify its response as well as its repeatability.