Challenges of Using High-Speed Film From Historical Sled Impact Acceleration Tests in the Analysis of Head Flail Kinematics

Abstract This work presents some of the challenges and solutions identified when using a historical collection of high-speed film from human research volunteer and anthropomorphic test device sled tests to define corridors for head flail kinematics. Challenges were related to film “jitter” and a lack of information about timing, test setups, and camera position. The challenges were addressed for a set of 939 tests using digitized high-speed film and minimal additional information for calculating head displacement, scaling, and translating to the seat origin. The method produced realistic head displacement data from tracked phototarget data. For the scaling method, the expanded uncertainty of measuring the phototarget size ranged from ±2.6 to ±3.7 pixels at a 95% confidence level. For the seat origin translation method, the average difference between calculated and actual seat origins was 6.6±5.0 cm. The methods implemented in this work can inform future work leveraging tracked kinematic data from this and other historical biodynamics datasets, especially large datasets that require batch processing.