In recent years, pedestrian protection has been increasing its importance in the field of vehicle crash safety. Under such circumstances, the European Enhanced Vehicle-safety Committee (EEVC) has proposed a test procedure for evaluating injuries to pedestrians in car-pedestrian accidents. This test procedure covers potential injuries to the adult head, pelvis, and lower limb, while only the head region is covered for children.

A number of child finite element (FE) models have been published for understanding injury mechanisms in child pedestrians. However, most of these models have been constructed by geometrically scaling an adult model. These scaled models do not take into account the specific anatomical structures in children, which do not allow these models to reproduce injuries exclusively observed in child pedestrians. In addition, the lack of sufficient in-depth accident data for child pedestrians leads to a need for a child FE model that accurately represents these specific structures, and is capable of reproducing injury mechanisms in child pedestrians.

This paper describes a preliminary FE model for a child pedestrian constructed using the MRI scans from a 6-year-old child. In the future, this model will be used for injury mechanism analysis and injury criteria development for child pedestrians.