Inspiration
In the automobile industry, car crash safety measures are almost exclusively tested on dummies based on male physiology… and so the fact that women have a different pelvic structure or variations in muscle mass, for example, is overlooked. Because of this, many of the safety devices in cars aren’t actually designed to protect women. Overall, women are at a much greater risk of lower leg, spinal, and internal injuries, particularly in frontal collisions. We created Where are the female dummies?, a car crash simulator, to spread awareness about the disparity in vehicular safety between men and women.
What it does
The user will be able to simulate two identical crashes: one involving a man, and one involving a woman.
How we built it
We calculated the various forces at play during the crash based on the car's velocity and mass. To visually demonstrate the collision, UNITY came in handy to simulate the effect of these forces, so that we can see how the person in the car gets moved in different ways
To make the simulation as realistic as possible, we ensured that the crash effects on the driver object varied between the man and the woman. For example, the woman driver is lighter, shorter, and more forward-leaning than her male counterpart, which intensifies the impact of the airbag deployment.
After both collisions happen, users are directed to a visual comparison of the female and male body injuries caused by the accident. Each time the simulation runs, the area and severity of injuries are generated. If that part of the body is injured, a red dot appears, and when the user clicks on it, an info bar pops up and displays the sex, body part, level of severity of the injury and the chance of getting that specific injury.
Challenges we ran into
This was a challenging project for us, as it was our first time using Unity. Collaboration with Unity was also very complicated, and it was hard to sync the editor versions over our different laptops (Windows and Mac). We also had trouble coming up with an idea, as we found that women's issues are very social and that it would be hard to find a project beyond a simple webpage that connects people. We wanted to step outside of our comfort zone.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very proud that we stayed on schedule, and we were coding with good practices (version control). We are also proud of how unique we hope our project will be.
What's next for Where are the Female Dummies?
In the future, we would like to run the simulation many times to get a probability distribution curve that is aligned with the statistics. We would also like to develop the simulation enough to the point where it can be useful to optimize road safety.
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