Feasibility Study for a Personal-Computer Based Head-Spine Model.

Abstract : Biodynamic Research Corporation (BRC) of San Antonio, TX, completed an SBIR Phase I project to port the Air Force Head-Spine Model (HSM) to a PC-DOS environment and provide a recommended roadmap for the future of the HSM. The impetus for this project was the Air Forces desire to have a software tool capable of modeling the internal forces and motions of the human head and spine during impulsive acceleration events. The program, originally designed to run on a mainframe computer, had been ported to a Unix workstation. BRC was able to successfully port the code to an MS-DOS compatible PC computer. The DOS and Unix versions code transfer was successful, BRC discovered several 'problems' with the HSM which made creating a general purpose HSM code impossible. The cost and effort required to understand the current version, debug coding and algorithm errors, and document the code is far greater than simply extracting the useful data and starting over. Therefore, BRC recommended that the HSM be rewritten for the PC environment and that the development program be conducted under a rigorous protocol designed to ensure documentation of the model's domain of applicability.