Pregnant
women don’t always feel they are safe and secure in cars today due to seat
belts fitting differently on pregnant bodies. Researchers are posing the
question, can the status quo be changed?
“The
common misperception that seat belts aren’t safe for pregnant women surprised
me,” says Juliana Said, a body design engineer at Toyota Motor North America
R&D. “ Our team had an idea: can we help show that the designs are safe,
while investigating areas for further enhancement?”
When
Said and her colleagues started to look at the issue, they encountered
unexpected challenges. There was limited research about the effectiveness of
seat belts with expectant mothers or their babies. Additionally, there appear
to be many third-party safety devices popular among parents that are untested
and unverified.
But
the biggest challenge is the widespread, erroneous belief among pregnant women
and their families that seat belts are unsafe for a fetus during a crash – and
that belief is so entrenched that some expectant mothers drive unbelted.
Statistics
however show that when worn properly, belted pregnant women are much safer in
crashes than those who don’t wear them.
Said
and her team started to work with Toyota’s Collaborative Safety Research Center
(CSRC), which contracted with the University of British Columbia (UBC) for
access to a specialized magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine designed to
map anatomies of all sorts of body shapes in a seated position.
“While
pregnant women properly wearing seat belts have better outcomes than no seat
belts, there are opportunities through new research to further explore seat
belt fit for pregnant women,” says Jason Hallman, senior research manager for
CSRC.
READ MORE: Keep your car safer
and on the road longer
The
center and its research collaborators set about the task of creating data that
engineers can use to potentially come up with future designs.
“We
design seat belts using standardized dummies and processes,” Hallman says.
“There’s no standardized dummy, no standardized tools available specifically
for assessing pregnant occupant safety. Therefore, the industry doesn’t have a
clear understanding of how future seat belts could better protect pregnant
women or fetuses during a crash.”
Using
this data, CSRC will create a computerized, three-dimensional model of pregnant
bodies of different shapes and sizes in different phases of pregnancy.
The
research project could help enhance one of Toyota’s research achievements, the
THUMS digital crash injury model. THUMS is like a virtual crash-test dummy,
constructed from painstaking research on different kinds of human tissue and
how they react to crash forces.
The
UBC research team devised a method to scan people seated in an automotive seat.
A smaller MRI device is moved several times to stitch together different views
until there’s an entire body image. Researchers are looking at how seat belts
interact with bones and internal organs, and are excited by the data’s
potential.
“We
will publish this data with Toyota, and make it available to other injury
biomechanics researchers, too,” says Peter Cripton, director of the Orthopedic
and Injury Biomechanics Group at UBC.
The
pregnant-body research and models may shed light on another top topic among
parents: whether third-party devices designed for pregnant women add a safety
benefit. These include pads to put on top of seat cushions, specialized lap
belts and metal shields, for example.
“These
devices may seem logical, but they’re not subject to the kind of rigorous
testing used for seats, belts, airbags and car interior parts, and they may not
be compatible with the way your car works,” says Said.
For
more information about CSRC’s research, visit amrd.toyota.com/division/csrc/.
With
better information in the future, pregnant women will be able to drive and ride
in cars more comfortably and with greater confidence.
(StatePoint)
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