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“Passenger kinematics in evasive maneuvers - Advancing Active Human Body Modeling and Understanding Variability in Passenger Kinematics During Evasive Maneuvers” is the title of Emma Larsson’s doctoral thesis, that she successfully defended today!

Emma is a Doctoral student at the Division of Vehicle Safety at the Department of Mechanics and Maritime Sciences at Chalmers University. Her research has had two focus areas, both aimed at how a car passenger moves during evasive manoeuvres. She has worked with human models with active muscles, which are used to simulate how humans move and activate their muscles during evasive manoeuvres. In her first focus area, she has further developed the control systems that activate the muscles in the model. In the second focus area, Emma has tried to find out why passengers move differently during manoeuvres. As part of the work, she has analyzed experiments with volunteers and used the human model.

One of the most important results in Emma’s research is that the belt seems to be one of the factors that most affects how the passenger moves during the maneuver. It feels very promising, because the belt is something you can influence. In addition to that, how you move, especially up and down, seems to be affected by how you sit in the chair.

Opponent was Associate Professor Ashley Weaver from Wake Forest University and her examiner was Professor Robert Thomson, Vice Head of Department – responsible for research and doctoral studies - Department of Mechanics and Maritime Sciences, Chalmers University. Supervisors have been Johan Davidsson, Johan Iraeus, Bengt Pipkorn and Jason Fice (until Licentiate). Emma has been working in the SAFER connected projects A-HBM, step 4/5.

Link to Emma’s thesis: https://research.chalmers.se/publication/536882/file/536882_Fulltext.pdf

We wish all the best to Emma in her future career!