Human ankle response in the brake pedal intrusion after the emergency braking

Top priority has been given to lower leg injuries in car security, as they are very frequent and result in long term disability and impairment. In a previous study we made the hypothesis that the ankle sprain and malleolar fractures (often observed in frontal car crashes) could be induced by the intrusion of brake pedal linked to a severe dorsiflexion and inversion. In the majority of previous studies load wasn’t applied to foot in conditions similar to those observed in emergency braking.(large impact or, neutral anatomical position, direction of the impact, dynamic ankle movements constrained without impact)[Begeman et al. (1993), Petit et al. (1996), Portier et al. (1997) and Funk et al. (2002)]. Therefore the aim of this work was to study the mechanisms and thresholds of failure of the ankle seen in frontal crashes, to improve mathematical models of the human lower leg.