Sensor Network with Active Instructional Content to Prevent Child Safety Seat Misuse

Project Summary/Abstract Minnesota HealthSolutions (MHS) proposes to develop an innovative child safety seat user engagement system that aims to actively educate, instruct and alarm caregivers with the goal of preventing critical child safety seat misuses and injuries to children riding in motor vehicles. Key enabling technologies make the proposed system technically feasible at this time. Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of unintentional morbidity and mortality in American children. In the past ten years, thousands of children have died in unintentional crashes and millions more had hospital-treated injuries. Properly utilized child safety seats are the most effective way to protect young children involved in crashes from serious injury or death and the vast majority of children are seated in child safety seats. However, 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. Better systems are needed to improve the rate of proper child safety seat use. We hypothesize that the proposed child safety seat user engagement 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 feasibility- and production- prototype systems in phase I and phase II, respectively. The phase II production-prototype development will be completed in a rigorous quality-controlled design and testing process to ensure a safe and effective product is produced.Project Narrative The population of interest for this device is virtually all child safety seat installers/users, which includes parents, grandparents, and child care providers. The available market for the proposed device exceeds 5 million units annually in the U.S. alone. There are approximately 30 million children 6 years old and younger in the U.S. By law, children in this age group must be restrained in a child safety seat. The proposed engagement/instructional/warning technology can provide benefit in nearly all of these seat installations.