Head Impact Location, Speed and Angle from Falls and Trips in the Workplace

Xiancheng Yu, Claire Baker, Mazdak Ghajari

Annals of Biomedical Engineering, 2023

Abstract

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a common injury in the workplace. Trips and falls are the leading causes of TBI in the workplace. However, industrial safety helmets are not designed for protecting the head under these impact conditions. Instead, they are designed to pass the regulatory standards which test head protection against falling heavy and sharp objects. This is likely to be due to the limited understanding of head impact conditions from trips and falls in workplace. In this study, we used validated human multi-body models to predict the head impact location, speed and angle (measured from the ground) during trips, forward falls and backward falls. We studied the effects of worker size, initial posture, walking speed, width and height of the tripping barrier, bracing and falling height on the head impact conditions. Overall, we performed 1692 simulations. The head impact speed was over two folds larger in falls than trips, with backward falls producing highest impact speeds. However, the trips produced impacts with smaller impact angles to the ground. Increasing the walking speed increased the head impact speed but bracing reduced it. We found that 41% of backward falls…

Cite as (BibTeX)

@article{yu-2023-head-impact-location-speed,
  title={Head Impact Location, Speed and Angle from Falls and Trips in the Workplace},
  author={Xiancheng Yu and Claire Baker and Mazdak Ghajari},
  journal={Annals of Biomedical Engineering},
  year={2023},
  doi={10.1007/s10439-023-03146-9}
}