Stephen W. T. Rouhana, Ph.D.

The quest to further improve the quality of crash testing has led the Ford Motor Company to begin development of a ‘virtual’ child to use as a crash test dummy in simulated accidents.

Ford claims it is one of the first research projects to build a digital human model of a child with more lifelike recreations of the skeletal structure, internal organs and brain.

It follows a similar program by the Detroit car-maker to build a digital adult in painstaking detail, which took some 11 years to complete and concluded in 2004.

Ford said it is building the child model to better understand how crash forces affect children and adults differently.

Senior technical leader for safety at Ford Research and Advanced Engineering, Steve Rouhana, said the project began after injury trends showed that children are generally more vulnerable in crashes.

Ford is developing what it calls the “virtual child,” in an attempt to learn very specifically how a child’s body reacts to the type of stresses put on it during a crash.

“This virtual child will allow us to better understand how a real human interacts with a restraint system,” says Dr. Steve Rouhana, Ford’s senior technical leader for passive safety.

The virtual child will not replace crash test dummies, says Ford, but will add to the information they get from testing. Rouhana says it will also allow researchers to do more tests than they could have done before.

“We’ll have 15 different ideas for restraint system tweaking,” he said. “We can test all of those in the virtual world and come up with the best 3 or 4 that we then take to the physical laboratory, and run a physical test with it.”

Ford researchers are currently working with a virtual adult model. It took them 11 years to develop that computer simulation. They are currently going over measurements, MRI’s and other body scans to come up with the virtual child. The company says this project should go faster, but it will still take years.