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An impact to the head has been the most frequent cause of life threatening injury to racing drivers, and protecting the driver's head is of prime importance. A head protection system must ensure that any loads or accelerations imparted do not exceed those which may cause injury. The aim of this work was investigate a number accidents during which a head injury or a substantial head impact occurred, in order to provide a better understanding of accident kinematics and head injury mechanisms. This work has been extremely important in providing detailed data on driver tolerance to head injury, for both translational and rotational motion, which both contribute significantly to injuries sustained during head impact. This work has indicated that the threshold for driver head injury may be somewhat higher than current published and accepted criteria. The results from this study will provide valuable information to ongoing FIA-TRL research into motorsport safety.

Currently, there is great interest in motorsports medicine in measuring driver head impact accelerations by adding small triaxial accelerometers to the communication earpieces worn by drivers. Various studies have attempted to validate the ability of the earpiece accelerometers to accurately measure head accelerations. Those experiments demonstrate success in being able to measure head accelerations on dummies and humans in low severity impacts and non-impact head motion. No study has been performed to ascertain the ability of the earpiece accelerometers to accurately measure rigid body head accelerations of the skull when they are mounted in a human ear canal and subjected to high severity head accelerations. This research was performed to evaluate the frequency response and coupling of the earpiece accelerometers to the human skull using post mortem human subject (PMHS) heads as the most realistic surrogate for the living human.

Head trauma continues to be the most frequent cause of life threatening injury to racing drivers and protecting the driver's head is of prime importance. A head protection system must ensure that any loads or accelerations imparted to the head do not exceed those which may cause injury. The FIA commissioned the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) in the UK to develop an advanced protective helmet and to propose an improved standard to which Formula-One protective helmets must comply. Throughout the project, TRL worked closely with the FIA Research Group, Carbon Fibre Technologies-UK, Bell Sports Europe and Snell-USA. During a preliminary phase, the performance of current motorsport helmets was evaluated with regard to both laboratory test and simulated accident conditions. Based on this work, provisional performance criteria were agreed for the improved helmet design.