The Center for Injury Biomechanics (CIB) at Wake Forest University’s School of Medicine will begin its project by developing computer software for vehicle safety testing.

“The two products we are going to be involved in, the first one has to do with computer modeling of the human body for trauma prediction. The second one has to do with advanced automatic crash notification and their systems for using the black box in the vehicle, the event data recorder and using the vehicle information to help triage people who are injured in vehicle crashes,” said Joel Stitzel Jr., Ph.D., a professor of medical engineering at Wake Forest.

Stitzel said the Center for Injury Biomechanics has previously worked with Toyota to help reduce trauma from head injuries.

“We have so much that we are not able to predict with crash test dummies and I think that these computer models of the human body are the future being able to predict injuries not just in vehicles but in other scenarios to like the military and in sports, so I’m excited that we are going to be basically developing the ability to predict injuries,” said Stitzel.

Toyota plans to share research collected during the projects with government agencies, other organizations and the public.