Behaviors and Postures in Response to Threat of Blunt Impact

Blunt impact tools are currently used in the field under conflict situations and continue to be proposed and refined for field use. The purposes of these analyses were to characterize behaviors and postures induced by the threat of paintball impact and to derive information about the probability of impacts resulting from those behaviors and postures. The probabilities of impacts at certain locations on the body and avoidance methods at different distances from the paintball markers were also of interest. Subjects engaged in several runs through the course with single or clustered point blunt impacts occurring in every zone. Cameras were positioned throughout the test bed to capture behavioral responses to the threat of paintball impacts. The resulting videos were synchronized and coded for behaviors, postures, trigger pulls, impacts, and impact locations using the Noldus Observer 11.5 application. The results demonstrated that methods of behavioral coding can be applied to understand responses to non-lethal weapons fire. A large variety of postures and behaviors were observed even in the highly controlled laboratory conditions. The majority of the hits were to the chest, arms, and surprisingly to the head (possibly because subjects would try to duck down to evade fire). The most frequent behavior was to move out of the line of fire and get behind objects. Behaviors did not seem to vary with distance. Further research is necessary to more fully explore what behaviors and postures are performed in response to the threat of blunt impact. These data are necessary for developing high-fidelity models that can predict risk of significant injury in targets of blunt impact weapons.