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Approximately 600,000 fatalities occur each year as a result of pedestrians being impacted by motor vehicles (World Bank, 2008). Previous studies (Heller et al., 2009) have utilized databases such as the National Inpatient Sample (NIS) to gain a more thorough understanding of the common injury patterns that occur in real-world traffic collisions involving pedestrians in the United States. The NIS contains records on five to eight million hospital stays annually and provides a wealth of information regarding injuries to hospitalized pedestrian casualties in the U.S. Because of the large number of applicable records in the NIS and the randomized sampling procedure, the data can be used to complete analyses that are not possible with smaller databases such as the Pedestrian Crash Data Study (PCDS), which is not intended to be statistically representative of pedestrian crashes in general.

Previous studies have suggested injury assessment reference values (IARVs) for lower neck injury based on scaled upper neck values. This study developed independent flexion and extension IARVs for the lower neck by matching Anthropomorphic Test Device (ATD) data to impact-tested post-mortem human subjects (PMHSs) with mid- to low-cervical spine injuries. Pendulum and sled tests with Hybrid III midsize male and small female ATDs were run under conditions mimicking those of published PMHS torso drop-sled tests and other PMHS studies. Measurements included upper and lower neck forces and moments, head acceleration, head rotation rate, and head/neck angles for the pendulum tests. Rear impacts corresponding to rigid seatback tests without a head restraint produced lower neck extension moments that increased dramatically with test severity, as measured by increasing delta-V and/or decreasing pulse duration.

Over half of the 1.2 million annual traffic fatalities worldwide are pedestrians struck by motor vehicles [ 1 ]. Medical databases, such as the National Inpatient Sample (NIS), have been utilized to ascertain injury patterns in the general population of injured pedestrians [ 2 - 3 ]. However, the authors are not aware of any studies investigating how factors, such as physical impairments, intoxication, and pre-existing medical implants (e.g. hip replacement, artificial knee, etc.) affect the prevalence of pedestrian accidents or injury outcomes. Five to eight million inpatient hospitalization records are included in the NIS annually, and this large sample size allows for analyses that are not possible with smaller data sets on pedestrian injuries. The current study utilizes the NIS to evaluate how several factors such as blindness, deafness, intoxication, and pre-existing medical implants affect injury patterns when compared to the general population of hospitalized pedestrians.