Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death among children in the United States. Child safety seats provide increased protection for children in motor vehicles and have been observed to reduce death and injury rates by more than 70%. A child must be properly belted into a properly installed child safety seat to achieve maximum protection. Several large studies have observed that only 10% to 20% of children are correctly harnessed into correctly installed seats. One of the most common errors involves the installation of the child safety seat in the vehicle. In most vehicles manufactured prior to 2002, a child safety seat is attached using the vehicle safety belts. In vehicles newer than 2002, a child safety seat may be attached using the Lower Anchors and Tethers for Children (LATCH) system. LATCH is designed to make installation of child safety seats easier by providing two lower anchors at the seat bight (the intersection of the seat back and cushion) onto which a rigid or flexible strap from a child seat is attached. Regardless of attachment modality, a seatbelt or flexible LATCH strap must be aggressively tensioned (greater than 30 lbs. typically) to achieve proper installation. Recent studies have observed from 50% to 100% of inspected child safety seats held in place by safety belts were too loose. Similarly, the most common error associated with LATCH installations has been observed to be a loose lower anchor strap, which was observed in 30% of installations. Loose child safety seat anchors increase the relative movement between the child safety seat and the vehicle thus increasing the likelihood of impact of the occupant, in particular of the head, with vehicle interior. The objective of this project is to develop an inexpensive power-retractable flexible lower anchor strap for child safety seats. This powered anchor strap will reduce the physical strength and agility required to properly tighten a child safety seat. We hypothesize that a powered anchor strap will increase proper child safety seat installation rates, thereby reducing motor vehicle crash injuries and deaths among children.
This project involves an improvement to child safety seats. The available market for the proposed powered child safety seat anchor strap exceeds 2.3 million units annually. There are approximately 20 million children under 4 years of age in the United States. All are required by law to ride in child safety seats.
