OBSERVATIONAL STUDIES OF CAR OCCUPANTS' POSITIONS (original) (raw)
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Youn 1 Investigation of Rear Seat Occupant Potential Injury Risk Base on Seat Belt Configurations
2015
The occupants of all ages and sizes can be seated in the rear seats. But legal requirements regarding the qualification of the second seat row restraint system with anthropomorphic test devices (ATDs) currently do not exist. The protection of frontal seat passengers in both driver and front seated occupant has been more focused from the auto industries as well as regulatory bodies more than 40 years. Fortunately, their interests have been extended to rear seat occupants especially children and female occupants in recent years. However, the current available safety devices for the rear seat occupants are standard seat belt system only. Also, the majority of the rear seat occupant studies were focused to evaluate and protect child either CRS or using seat belt restrained in rear seat. The rear seat seemed to offer the greatest protection to children 0–12 years. Children seated in the rear seat had a lower risk of death compared with front seat passengers whether or not they were restr...
Annals of advances in automotive medicine / Annual Scientific Conference ... Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine. Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine. Scientific Conference, 2008
Recent studies have shown that restrained occupants over the age of 50 in frontal crashes have a higher risk of injury in the rear seat than in the front, and have hypothesized that the incorporation of technology such as belt pre-tensioning and force limiting preferentially in the front seat is at least partially responsible for this trend. This study investigates the potential benefits and trade-offs of seat belt pretensioners and force-limiters in the rear seat using a series of frontal impact sled tests at two speeds (48 km/h and 29 km/h DeltaV) with a buck representing the interior of the reat seat occupant compartment of a contemporary mid-sized sedan. Four different dummies were tested: the Hybrid III six year old (in a booster seat, H3 6YO), the Hybrid III 5(th) percentile female (H3 AF05), the Hybrid III 50(th) percentile male (H3 AM50), and the THOR-NT. The restraints consisted of either a standard three point belt, or a 3-point belt with a retractor pretensioner and a pro...
The Ability of 3 Point Safety Belts to Restrain Occupants in Rollover Crashes
Three point safety belts are intended to restrain front seat occupants in motor vehicle crashes. Their purpose is to reduce the severity of occupant collisions with the interior of a vehicle and thus to reduce occupant injury. Manufacturers and the government test occupant protection in frontal collisions both for compliance with federal requirements and under a federal consumer information program. No consensus exists for a test of the ability of seat belts to prevent harmful contact with the roof and roof structure of vehicles. This paper describes a simple test procedure and provides data from tests of some common production safety belt systems. These tests demonstrate that most of the production belts place the head and neck in potentially injurious positions in a rollover. These tests also show that simple geometric improvements could provide substantial head and neck protection in rollover crashes.
Frontal crash seat belt restraint effectiveness and comfort accessories used by older occupants
Traffic Injury Prevention, 2019
Objective: Around a quarter of older occupants use some type of comfort or orthopedic aftermarket accessory on the vehicle seat while traveling in a vehicle. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of comfort accessories on the performance of the seat belt restraint system in a frontal crash in terms of potential injury implications for older occupants. Methods: Eight frontal sled tests (43 km/h, 32 g) were carried out on a deceleration sled fitted with a three-point lap-sash seat belt and a front passenger seat from a common Australian passenger car for each test. A 5 th percentile Hybrid III anthropometric test device (ATD) was positioned in the seat and measurements were recorded for head center of gravity acceleration, chest acceleration, neck forces and moments and sternal deflection. Tests were carried out in a baseline condition and with seven comfort accessories. Each comfort accessory was inserted between the ATD and vehicle seat as it is intended to be used, with the ATD otherwise positioned as close as possible to the baseline test position. Results: Initial distance between the seat belt anchor and ATD hip was associated with a statistically significant decrease in Head Injury Criterion and increase in sternal deflection. Submarining was related to the ATD torso recline angle and angle of the lap belt from the seat belt anchor. Conclusions: Accessories placed between the seat back and the lumbar region of an occupant have the potential to increase the risk of submarining due to a change in posture and should be avoided if such a change in posture when seated with an accessory is excessive. Sitting on seat cushions resulted in the greatest increase in seat belt anchor to hip distances and hence largest increase in sternal deflection. Given the fragility, frailty and particular importance of chest injuries among older vehicle occupants, further investigation is needed to determine whether these changes in ATD sternal deflection observed with seat cushion use results in injury threshold limits being exceeded and whether pretensioners and load limiters would ameliorate these effects without causing other negative changes in occupant response or kinematics.
Optimizing Seat Belt and Airbag Designs for Rear Seat Occupant Protection in Frontal Crashes
Stapp car crash journal, 2017
Recent field data have shown that the occupant protection in vehicle rear seats failed to keep pace with advances in the front seats likely due to the lack of advanced safety technologies. The objective of this study was to optimize advanced restraint systems for protecting rear seat occupants with a range of body sizes under different frontal crash pulses. Three series of sled tests (baseline tests, advanced restraint trial tests, and final tests), MADYMO model validations against a subset of the sled tests, and design optimizations using the validated models were conducted to investigate rear seat occupant protection with 4 Anthropomorphic Test Devices (ATDs) and 2 crash pulses. The sled tests and computer simulations were conducted with a variety of restraint systems including the baseline rear-seat 3-point belt, 3-point belts with a pre-tensioner, load limiter, dynamic locking tongue, 4-point belts, inflatable belts, Bag in Roof (BiR) concept, and Self Conforming Rear seat Air B...
Traffic Injury Prevention, 2015
Recent field data analyses have shown that the safety advantages of rear seats relative to the front seats have decreased in newer vehicles. Separately, the risks of certain injuries have been found to be higher for obese occupants. The objective of this study is to investigate the effects of advanced belt features on the protection of rear-seat occupants with a range of body mass index (BMI) in frontal crashes. Methods: Whole-body finite element human models with 4 BMI levels (25, 30, 35, and 40 kg/m 2) developed previously were used in this study. A total of 52 frontal crash simulations were conducted, including 4 simulations with a standard rear-seat, 3-point belt and 48 simulations with advanced belt features. The parameters varied in the simulations included BMI, load limit, anchor pretensioner, and lap belt routing relative to the pelvis. The injury measurements analyzed in this study included head and hip excursions, normalized chest deflection, and torso angle (defined as the angle between the hip-shoulder line and the vertical direction). Analyses of covariance were used to test the significance (P < .05) of the results. Results: Higher BMI was associated with greater head and hip excursions and larger normalized chest deflection. Higher belt routing increased the hip excursion and torso angle, which indicates a higher submarining risk, whereas the anchor pretensioner reduced hip excursion and torso angle. Lower load limits decreased the normalized chest deflection but increased the head excursion. Normalized chest deflection had a positive correlation with maximum torso angle. Occupants with higher BMI have to use higher load limits to reach head excursions similar to those in lower BMI occupants. Discussion and Conclusion: The simulation results suggest that optimizing load limiter and adding pretensioner(s) can reduce injury risks associated with obesity, but conflicting effects on head and chest injuries were observed. This study demonstrated the feasibility and importance of using human models to investigate protection for occupants with various BMI levels. A seat belt system capable of adapting to occupant size and body shape will improve protection for obese occupants in rear seats.
Injuries, seat-belts and further research
Emergency Medicine Journal, 1985
This study is important for three main reasons. Firstly, it demonstrates the success of the seatbelt law in Britain on a detailed multi-hospital basis, illustrating the wisdom of such a law. Secondly, it illustrates the limitations of the seat-belts which have been fitted to cars in the last 10 years, by describing the nature, frequency and severity of injuries to restrained occupants. Thirdly, it illustrates how new knowledge about trauma can be acquired by cooperation between accident and emergency departments in separate hospitals in the UK. This is the first major study of its kind, and the first time that the Department of Health and Social Security has put any significant funding into road injury research.
2020
This publication deals with the investigation of advanced occupant protection principles for rotated seating positions in highly and fully automated vehicles. In this context, a repositioning of the occupant into a safe seating configuration prior to a crash can be an integral part of a holistic safety concept. The two presented principles address a passenger in a rotated position, pointing away from the driving direction. When a crash is imminent, the seat is rotated into the crash direction, to ensure airbag and seatintegrated three-point belt system can provide restraint. While in the first protection principle the seat is actively rotated, in the second principle the rotation is caused by the inertia of the seat and occupant. A Simcenter Madymo Active Human model in a generic multibody vehicle interior representation was used to investigate these principles, focusing on the effects of rotational repositioning on the occupant’s kinematic response. Based on a simulation study, the...
Driver Out-Of-Position Injuries Mitigation and Advanced Restraint Features Development
2001
Airbag related out-of-position (OOP) injuries in automotive crash accidents have drawn great attention by the public in recent years. In the interim-final rule of Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards that NHTSA issued in May 2000, OOP static test becomes a mandatory requirement of new regulations and will be phased in starting from year 2003. Due to the complexities and constraints of vehicle design, such as extreme vehicle styling and packaging as well as multiple safety requirements, it is a great challenge for both restraint safety suppliers and automobile manufacturers to work together to come up with proper designs to meet the requirements of new regulations and provide additional protection for both in-position and OOP occupants at various vehicle crash scenarios. In this paper, the technique of developing advanced restraint systems and mitigating the OOP injuries is described. With the aid of computer simulation using coupled structural/computational fluid dynamics scheme i...
World Journal of Surgery, 2012
Background Injury and death from road traffic collisions (RTCs) is a major health problem worldwide. The seat belt is the most important RTC safety innovation to reduce injury severity and death from RTCs. We aimed to study the effects of seat belt usage on injury patterns and outcomes of restrained vehicle occupants compared with unrestrained occupants after RTCs. Methods RTC trauma patients who were vehicle occupants and admitted to Al-Ain and Tawam Hospitals, or who died after arrival at the emergency departments were prospectively studied during the period of April 2006 to October 2007. Demography of patients, position in the vehicle, usage of seat belts, injury severity markers, Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS), hospital stay, need for surgery, injured body regions, and mortality were analyzed. Results Of 783 vehicle occupants, 766 (98%) patients with known seat belt status were studied. Among them, the 631 (82.4%) who were unrestrained were significantly younger than the restrained patients (P \ 0.0001). The Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS) scores for the thorax, back, and lower extremity were significantly higher in unrestrained than in restrained patients (P = 0.001, P = 0.036, and P = 0.045 respectively). The GCS was significantly lower in unrestrained than in restrained patients (P = 0.006). More surgical operations were performed in the unrestrained patients (P = 0.027). Conclusions Seat belt usage reduces the severity of injury, hospital stay, and number of operations in injured patients. Seat belt compliance is low in our community. More legal enforcement of seat belt usage is mandatory to reduce the severity of injury caused by RTCs.