Traumatic brain injury (TBI) causes 1.1 million trips to the hospital each year in the US, with 235,000 of these injuries requiring admissions. Given the importance of TBI, head injury has been studied extensively using both cadavers and anthropomorphic test devices (ATDs). However, few studies have benchmarked the response of ATD heads against human data.

The goal of this study was to investigate the response of the adult and ATD heads in impact, and to compare ATD and human responses. In this study, six adult heads and seven ATD heads were used to obtain impact properties. The heads were dropped from 15cm and 30cm onto five impact locations.

No statistical differences were found between the adult human heads and the adult Hybrid III head for 15cm and 30cm rigid surface impacts (p<0.05). For the human heads, the mid-sagittal impact locations produced the highest HIC and peak acceleration values. The parietal impacts were found to produce HICs and peak accelerations that were 26% to 48% lower than the mid-sagittal impacts. For the ATD heads, the acceleration and HIC generally increased with represented age, except for the Q3, which produced the HIC values up to 56% higher than the other heads.