University Starts Child-Passenger Safety Study
By Danny King August 23, 2011
The University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) is studying how children position themselves in car seats in an effort to gather more realistic data that may help reduce child fatalities from car accidents. UMTRI's biosciences group this month is studying more than 100 children between ages 4 and 11 and using "three-dimensional measurement tools" to record how safety belts fit on children in a wide variety of physical positions, as opposed to the static, belted crash-test dummies that have previously been used to test child safety. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is funding the study.
"Child safety is a high priority for automakers, but they have been hampered by the lack of fidelity in the crash dummies and other tools used to represent children," UMTRI research associate professor Matthew Reed told AutoObserver. "The current research will improve those tools and enable manufacturers to create safer vehicles."
UMTRI is looking to get more detailed, real-world information on what the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention says is the leading cause of death for U.S. children. Car accidents killed almost 10,000 people under 16 years old in the U.S. between 2005 and 2009, according to NHTSA, and injure more than 150,000 children a year, according to the CDC. Crash-test dummies used to simulate children in child seats or boosters are generally erect and fail to address the fact that children squirm in the seat, creating slack in seat belts that, in the case of an accident, will often not properly restrain a child during a crash.
Child Fatalities Down
The Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) No. 213, which addresses child safety, sets national safety criteria for passengers under 65 pounds, including outlining standards related issues such as safety-belt pressure and head-restraint padding. Such standards appear to be helping to cut child fatalities. In 2009, 1538 people under the age of 16 were killed in traffic accidents, or 4.5 percent of the 33,808 traffic fatalities that year, according to NHTSA. That compares with 2,942 under-16 fatalities, or 7.1 percent of the total, a decade earlier.
And some automakers are doing their own tests to improve child safety. Ford Motor Co. in March said it started working on a digital version of a child-size crash test dummy seven years after completing its adult-sized digital dummy. The automaker secured a one-year contract with China’s Tainjin University of Science and Technology, which will work with that city’s Children’s Hospital to obtain MRIs and CAT scans to help provide information on child body geometry and other information that will be used to create more a more realistic digital version of a child’s brain, skeletal structure and internal organs.
Outdated Standards
Still, the most recent amendment to FMVSS No. 13 -- mandating that automakers require latch attachments for child-safety seats -- took place almost a decade ago, indicating that federal standards are out of date and making studies such as the one conducted by UMTRI necessary, according to longtime automobile engineer Chris Theodore. With most of the passenger-safety emphasis by federal regulators involving developing and improving features such as airbags for front-seat passengers, child-safety and any issues involving rear-seat passengers have been overlooked, said Theodore, who's worked with all three major U.S. automakers during his four decades in the industry and whose work with Ford included helping develop the inflatable seatbelts that are available in models such as the Ford Explorer.
Theodore referred to products such as CG-Lock and SeatSnug -- which cinch the seatbelts that strap in children and their car seats and prevent slack from developing during the course of a car ride – as examples of private companies attempting to address what NHTSA and other federal regulators have failed to do in recent years. Theodore called the UMTRI study "an important first step" and said he hoped it would be the first of many on the subject. "The current federal standards for child-safety seats are woefully obsolete," said Theodore. "Kids are our most precious cargo, and I think they’ve gotten the short shrift."
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