Abdominal injuries occur seldom but are often of high severity. Various proposals for the assessment of the abdominal injury risk have been made. Nevertheless only a few dummies are equipped with abdominal sensors.

With support from the European CHILD and APROSYS projects abdominal surface force sensors for Q child dummies and the Hybrid III 50 percentile dummy were developed. The surface matrix force sensors are able to assess the time history of the applied force and the location of the load, which is important as different abdominal regions are meant to require different load limits. The sensors for the Q dummies were used in the CHILD project reconstruction programme. The analysis of 14 accident reconstructions indicates a very good correlation between the applied load assessed by the proposed sensor and the AIS 3+ injury risk. However, the number of cases is still small. Additional reconstruction cases should be able to validate the described results.