Safety-Enhancing Motor Vehicle Child Safety Seat

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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 head injuries in motor vehicle crashes. Unfortunately, the attachments are inconveniently located on child safety seats and difficult to use properly and several large studies have observed that only 10% to 20% 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 easy-to-use feature that will improve crash performance and also help mitigate the effects of 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 prototype system.