Whiplash protection

Two Loughborough University graduates have won an international engineering safety competition with their unique design aimed at reducing the number of neck injuries caused by car accidents.

Ross Crouch and Simon Clark, who both graduated this summer from the University’s Wolfson School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, scooped first place in the ASME International Safety Engineering and Risk Analysis Division (SERAD) and the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) Annual Student Paper Contest.

They also became the first winners of the prize to come from outside the USA.

The competition was established to promote safety engineering as a field of study and to encourage students to consider safety engineering as a career option.

The paper by Ross and Simon, entitled ‘Design of a Smart Head Restraint System for Whiplash Protection’, outlined their idea for a new type of ‘intelligent’ car head restraint system that uses sensors to detect the position of an occupant’s head when seated in a car seat. The system then uses that positional information to move the head restraint into an optimum position to reduce the chances of receiving whiplash injuries in the event of a rear impact.