Just hanging around

It’s an indication of one’s ignorance to say that all crash test dummies look the same. It’s easy to tell the difference when you get to know them . For example, the suspended one (below) has specially modified hips which allow it to sit upright on a train seat. Yes, there are indeed experiments where trains are crashed to see how they can be made safer, and the experts at TRL (the Transport Research Laboratory) know exactly how to prepare the dummies to extract the right information.

The keen-eyed will notice that the two dummies in the background also look a little different. They once held down good jobs as motorcycle crash test dummies. However, they got knocked about so much that they don’t cut the mustard any more. Today they are merely “make-weights” – strapped into vehicles that need a full complement of inert passengers for a realistic crash test.

The lesson is clear. Don’t judge a dummy by its looks. Take a little time and get to know it. You may be surprised by how much you have in common.

Hit Parade

Dummies are, on the whole, passive servants of our bidding. They will wear what we ask and sit when they are told. There is one, however, that has to be told quite firmly. In fact, it is asking to be hit. Often.
This manikin is called SlamMan. We came across it in a barn in Kent, England. It’s fully-wired and includes a microchip, which is the nearest a dummy can get to having a brain.
This gives it just enough intelligence to switch on different lights around its torso and head, showing exactly where it wants to be hit. Or maybe the lights go on wherever it is hit. We don’t know for sure because half of its wiring was hanging out so we couldn’t try it out.

 

SlamMan is the docile training partner for solitary martial arts practitioners. It gives them the opportunity to improve their reactions and the accuracy of their punches, thumps, slaps and kicks.

To be fair, it shouldn’t really have a place in this blog because, despite its undoubted resilience, it is clearly only half a man. The top half, to be precise. But it looks so peculiar, like a punch-drunk boxer who’s lost all awareness of where he is, that he deserves a little recognition because he could never, ever, be a contender.

Radio Bionic

The figure on the right is a scientist at Queen Mary, University of London. The figure on the left is a hollow “phantom”. The chamber in which they stand excludes electromagnetic radiation.

The scientist fills the phantom with fresh lamb meat. He buries a small antenna in the meat and triggers it to send and receive radio signals.
The aim is to design an antenna for implantable medical devices for insulin delivery, pacemaker regulation, cardiac defibrillation and bowel control.
The perfected antenna will improve patient comfort because the implanted devices will then be totally free from wires. A nurse or doctor will be able to monitor and regulate the wireless device inside the patient from their office down the corridor.
But first the scientists must be confident that signals to and from the antenna propagate efficiently and do not affect human body tissue.
Each experiment must stop after four hours. After that point, the meat is no longer fresh enough to have the same properties as living human flesh.
A virtual phantom – a computer model – is being constructed so soon the experiments will be able to continue without visits to the butcher.
In a previous life, the phantom was used to test the electromagnetic radiation from police radio handsets. That’s why its hand is in front of its face.

Heavy lifting

Emergency service staff have always trained hard to work efficiently under extreme conditions. Now they can practice rescuing extremely overweight people with a training dummy weighing 28 stone (178 kg).

It’s made by the same people who produce the rather slimmer marine rescue training dummy we featured in Wet and is designed to be carried by up to six people. According to the company’s web site, “Obesity is a very real problem in the UK and across the world and judging by government figures the problem is getting worse, [so] rescue teams will need to consider how they will deal with casualties of this size and this dummy will enable realistic training to take place. We have worked very hard to achieve a ‘fluidity of movement’ with the weight rather than just producing a heavy ‘lump’, so we think it will be very realistic to work with.”

One day we hope to meet this fat manequin in person, properly described as “bariatric”, but, until then, we’ll have to be satisfied with these strangely unsettling pictures, courtesy of the svelt people at Ruth Lee Ltd and the BBC.

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