Ford starts building digital children crash dummies

Ford announced that they have officially started work on building a digital human child, complete with its internal organs, skeleton structure and brain, all in the name of safety research. Car safety testing has been going on for years now, with the use of adult crash test dummies, which is fine when testing a car’s safety towards adults, but we all know that adults aren’t the only ones in cars all the time – there’s children too. And while adult dummies can give relevant feedback about how a crash affects an adult, it’s not going to have the same impact on a child. And with the new digital child crash dummy, Ford hopes to find out how things differ, and what they can do to make things better. Since data about children isn’t as readily available as it is for adults, Ford will be working with Tianjin University of Science and Technology that works with Tianjin Children’s Hospital to get information about human kids. Ford will be basing their model on data obtained from MRIs, and CAT scans provided by volunteers. With these models, more accurate testing can be done and hopefully in the future, cars will be as safe as they are for kids as they are for adults.