Thoracic injuries are one of the dominant causes of fatalities and severe injuries in car crashes today. THORAX‐FP7 is a collaborative medium scale project under the Seventh Framework which focuses on reduction and prevention of thoracic injuries through an improved understanding of the thoracic injury mechanisms and the implementation of this understanding in an updated design for the thorax‐shoulder complex of the THOR dummy as well as in human boy models.

The models and dummy will enable the design and evaluation of advanced restraint systems for a wide variety (gender, age and size) of car occupants. This paper presents results achieved during the first three years of the project related to dummy hardware developments. The hardware development involved five steps:​ 1) Identification of the dominant thoracic injury types from field data, 2) Specification of biomechanical requirements, 3) Identification of injury parameters and necessary instrumentation, 4) Dummy hardware development and 5) Evaluation of the demonstrator dummy.

The accident surveys were reported in a previous IRCOBI paper. This paper describes the selection of human response data suitable for assessment of frontal dummy performance, studies into the injury criteria which are independent of the loading type and the dummy developments done so far.