Safety-Enhancing Motor Vehicle Child Safety Seat

NIH RePORTER · ALLCDC · R44 · $863,683 · view on reporter.nih.gov ↗

Abstract

Project Summary/Abstract Minnesota HealthSolutions Corporation (MHS) proposes to develop an enhanced child safety seat that offers improved crash protection and mitigation against misuse. Child safety seats are installed in vehicles by properly attaching and tensioning the main seat-to-vehicle anchorage points. Proper use of the seat-to-vehicle attachments is extremely important in achieving the maximum available reduction of child injuries in motor vehicle crashes. Unfortunately, the attachments are inconveniently located on child safety seats and difficult to use properly. Several large studies have observed that only 10% to 40% of children are correctly harnessed into correctly installed seats. Improper use of child safety seats substantially reduces their effectiveness and is a major public health concern. The proposed child safety seat will offer enhanced crash protection through an innovative, inexpensive easy-to-use feature that will improve crash performance and also help mitigate the effects of seat misuse. We hypothesize that the proposed child safety seat will reduce vehicle crash-related child injuries and deaths. An interdisciplinary team of researchers has been assembled to define, build, and evaluate a production prototype system.

Key facts

NIH application ID
10505200
Project number
5R44CE003388-03
Recipient
MINNESOTA HEALTHSOLUTIONS CORPORATION
Principal Investigator
Nick Rydberg
Activity code
R44
Funding institute
ALLCDC
Fiscal year
2022
Award amount
$863,683
Award type
5
Project period
2021-09-30 → 2023-09-29