The recent real-world experience with the frontal airbags and their sometimes unfortunate interaction with small size adults and children led to the analytical efforts and the results reported in this paper. The focus of this paper is an analytical study investigating the side impact protection performance of side airbags in interaction with, out-of-position occupants. The study evaluates inter...

The use of current seat belts has been shown to be effective in reducing deaths and serious injuries to restrained car occupants by 50% compared to unrestrained. Real world accident studies have identified limitations to the performance of set belts. This has led to the next major evolution in restraint design which is the development of the intelligent restraints. The options for intelligent r...

Automatic reasoning is applied to building design problems with a large number of standardized conditions, such as normal housing. Industrialized home building can provide quick-to-build low-cost dwellings, but these buildings often are not as appropriate for the local climate, building site or to the occupant needs as tailor-made homes. In this article we present a knowledge-based system (KBS)...

INTRODUCTION Longitudinal barriers, such as guardrails, are designed to prevent a vehicle that leaves the roadway from impacting a more dangerous object while minimizing the risk of injury to the vehicle occupants. Current full-scale test procedures for these devices do not consider the effect of occupant restraints such as seatbelts and airbags. The purpose of this study was to determine the e...

Black and Hispanic adults travel less in motor vehicles than whites but may be at greater risk when they do travel. Passenger vehicle occupant deaths per 10 million trips among persons ages 25-64 were computed by race, Hispanic origin, gender, and socioeconomic status (SES) using 1995 data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) and Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey. Educatio...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Mortality from road traffic collisions (RTC) is a major problem in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Low compliance with seatbelt usage can be a contributing factor for increased mortality. The present study aimed to ascertain the presence of a relationship between seatbelt non-compliance of vehicle occupants and mortality rates in the GCC countries versus ...

In January 2001, NHTSA issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) concerning the regulation of automobile head restraints in Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) 202. This report presents analyses of occupant posture and position data that were conducted in preparation for comments from UMTRI on the NPRM. The focus of this report is on the potential impact of head restraint geometry...

Knowing the presence or the actual number of occupants in a space at any given time is essential for the effective management of various building operation functions such as security and environmental control (e.g., lighting, HVAC). In the past, motion detection using Passive Infrared (PIR) sensors has been widely deployed in commercial buildings and can provide data on “presence” status. Howev...

Energy delivery to households can count up to 50% of primary energy consumption in the United States. As proactive response to this classical engineering sentiment, much efforts made to address this energy delivery process, however, have one one caveat in common: targeting at conditioning only air, despite it being a proxy of occupant comfort. What if we rethink the process of how we delivery e...