Intuitive Child Safety Seat to Increase Security

Project Summary/Abstract Minnesota HealthSolutions Corporation (MHS) proposes to develop a child safety seat with a novel intuitive harness tensioning system to improve the rate of proper harnessing of children into child safety seats. Children are harnessed into child safety seats via a 5-point harness with shoulder straps that buckle at the crotch. The entire harness assembly must be properly tensioned to ensure safety. Loose harnesses are a common misuse in child safety seats. Several large studies have observed that only 10% to 20% of children are correctly harnessed into correctly installed seats. Improper use of child restraints substantially reduces their effectiveness and is a major public health concern. The proposed child safety seat will utilize an all mechanical, intuitive system to improve proper use of the child safety seat harness. We hypothesize that a child safety seat that provides an intuitive and easy-to-use harness system will significantly improve the rate of proper child safety seat usage and reduce vehicle crash-related child injuries and deaths. An interdisciplinary team of researchers has been assembled to define, build, and evaluate a prototype system.