Child Safety in Car Crashes: A Modeling Approach for Safety System Improvements

Abstract

Traffic-related trauma is the most common cause of fatality and severe injury to children in developed countries. Injury epidemiology has shown that special attention is needed for the 3-year- olds in boosters and the 12-year-olds in seat belts only. The aim of this paper is to study the frontal and side-impact models and to use them to investigate and define the beneficial characteristics of restraint systems and other crash-related car parameters. Qualitative approaches using two load cases were analyzed and validated via video. The validations from the frontal impact type and near- side impact showed that the child had high potential to mitigate injuries resulting from a frontal impact. The upper belt anchor point should be positioned so that the belt is routed near the mid- shoulder (slightly toward the neck) and encloses the shoulder (tight fit). These findings are significant contributions to the continuous work of mitigating traffic accident induced injuries and fatalities to children. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.