Article

Many wheelchair users remain in their wheelchairs during transit. Safety research
for wheelchair users has focused mainly on frontal impact. However, although they
are generally less severe,
rear-impact injuries are expensive and difficult to
treat and whiplash injury protection for adult wheelchair users remains poorly
understood. In this article, 10 g (16 km/h) rear-impact sled tests conducted with
the Biofidelic Rear Impact Dummy II or BioRID-II (Denton ATD Inc and Chalmers
University of Technology; Gothenburg, Sweden) seated in a rigid wheelchair with
no head restraint showed that Abbreviated Injury Scale-score 1 neck injury risk
evaluated with the neck injury criterion (NIC) and Nkm criterion is substantially
above proposed threshold levels.
A prototype wheelchair head restraint was
developed and tested together with an existing commercial head restraint (Rolko;
Borgholzhausen, Germany) in the same 10 g (16 km/h) rear impact. Both head
restraints reduced the injury scores substantially. NIC test scores for the head
restraints with no gap ranged from 18 to 24 (approximately 20%-30% chance of neck
injury symptoms of duration >1 month) compared with test scores for no head
restraints that ranged from 34 to 37 (approximately 95% chance of neck injury).
The corresponding extension-posterior Nkm scores with no gap ranged from 0.30 to
0.35 (approximately 5% chance of neck injury) compared with no head restraint of
1.16 (approximately 45% chance of neck injury symptoms). However, the number of
sled tests performed was small (three with no head restraint and six with a head
restraint), and these results should be considered mainly trends. Preliminary
results also showed that the horizontal gap between the head and the wheelchair
head-restraint cushion should be as small possible.

Langue : ANGLAIS