NP5: Neck Pain in Pilots Prediction and Prevention Protocol

Neck pain is a critical problem for military pilots, particularly helicopter pilots. In order to minimized chronic neck pain in aircrew, Intelligent Automation, Inc. proposes a modular pain prediction model that aims to integrate traditional biomechanical modeling with the biopsychosocial model of pain in order to form recommendations around seating, headgear, restraints, and operational guidelines. Specifically, this model will use probabilistic modelling to generate representative acceleration exposures and postures over the duration of a flight given anthropometric and operational parameters. These acceleration exposures and postures will pass through a biomechanical model to generate forces occurring at the neck. These forces are used to generate a series of mechanism-specific risk metrics which are used in conjunction with measured psychosocial factors to calculate both the risk of acute pain and the risk of acute to chronic pain transition. This model will inform the design and development of a novel seating system by enabling the evaluation of the seat design for aircrew encompassing the range of anthropometric variability between the 5th female to 95th male percentiles.