The concept of "harm" has been recently used as a yardstick to assess injury prevention priorities. Harm provides an accounting unit by which injuries of different severities can be integrated. The total harm can then be subdivided by body region, part of the vehicle causing the injury, crash direction, crash severity, etc.

In searching for countermeasures to reduce harm, some mechanism for estimating the benefits is required. The use of occupant simulations is one useful method of making preliminary estimates of the countermeasures which might be most profitably applied. The purpose of this paper is to show how occupant models can be used in conjunction with the concept of harm to guide research priorities.

The paper summarizes the relative harm attributed to various vehicle components in frontal collisions and illustrates how models can be used in assessing alternative countermeasures for further research. The methodology is equally applicable to other crash modes and occupant positions.