Customized Pilot Cervical Spine Protection Orthosis Development

Pilots and crew of rotary-wing aircraft can be exposed to inertial and task position stressors that generate pain. Repeated painful exposures with or without tissue damage are precursors to pain sensitization and chronic pain. Chronic pain leads to reduced operational readiness and long-term medical treatment. This study investigated protection orthosis for unrecoverable effects on the cervical spine by heavy helmets and accessories. A user-customized product has been developed and customization has been intended to be done with multi-body dynamic modeling and testing. Although there are many biomechanical models of the human cervical spine in the literature, their analysis capabilities to perform modal analysis and frequency response analysis are limited. Especially for Rotary-wing applications, models with such capabilities will play an essential role in diagnosing and rehabilitating musculoskeletal disorders and designing engineering devices to prevent and heal cervical spine injuries. Therefore, a detailed head-cervical spine model is developed in which frequency domain analysis is possible. Alternative design solutions have been investigated to support helmets to decrease the load exerted on the neck periphery. Finally, tests have been performed to correlate analysis with a real helicopter environment. At the end of the study, a customizable neck orthosis has been developed and verified with the tests that it reduces the adverse effects of heavy helmets on the cervical spine periphery.