News

As of February 1st, Johan Iraeus took over the role of being responsible for the development of SAFER's human body models for use in the automotive industry after Karin Brolin. SAFER's human body models are world-leading and the ambition is to continue to perform cutting edge research and development in this area.

Johan has an engineering background from Chalmers and has extensive industry experience, mainly from the automotive industry but also from other areas such as telecom and the nuclear industry. In 2015 he received his PhD at the medical faculty of Umeå University. The objective of the project was to estimate injury risk in real life crashes using simulations with human body models. The SAFER environment is familiar to Johan; he was leading some of first projects when the center opened in 2006 and have been part of many projects along the way. He is now looking forward to his new mission.

Focus on variations between humans
"I look forward to developing this area further”, says Johan. “There are many challenges for the future, and one of the most important and interesting is to develop the models to account for human variability. Today we have an average man and an average woman in our simulation toolbox, but each individual is unique, and important parameters to consider can be for example age, length, and weight. Our aim is now to make our models represent a larger portion of the real population”.
The human body model available today at SAFER for its partners combines research results from several HBM projects and is world-leading in its functionality. Johan tells:
“As far as we know, this is the only model that manages to recreate the pre-crash occupant movement in a turn or brake maneuver and then seamless switch to the subsequent crash during the same simulation”.

New seating positions with automated vehicles
Another area that Johan will focus on is to customize the models for future automation. A self-driving car will open up to completely new seating positions, as you no longer need to hold the steering wheel and keep your eyes on the road. The models must be validated to these new situations.
“Being able to calculate the effects of and understand how new in-car protection systems helps to reduce the injury risk is valuable for car manufacturers”.

Overall, the interest in SAFER's human body model is high among the members. From being a purely research tool, several companies are now working on the implementation of the tool in their product development processes.

"Our human body model is clearly a more human-like alternative to today's crash test dummies," concludes Johan.