A cooperative research project with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) was conducted to evaluate the capability of a Tubular Thoracic Cushion (TTC) airbag concept to significantly reduce rib deflections for the SID-IIs dummy in the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s (IIHS) side-impact barrier test. The concept of the TTC airbag was to efficiently distribute a major...

Neck injuries caused by rear-end collisions have become a major problem in traffic safety over the last two decades, however, surprisingly little effort has been made so far to improve car seat and head rest design. Several studies have shown, that whiplash injuries can be reduced by minimizing the gap between head and head restraint during the first phase of a rear-end impact. On the other han...

Occupants’ presence and actions within the built environment are crucial aspects related to understanding variations in energy use. Within this chapter, first, a nomenclature for the field of research dealing with occupants in buildings is defined. This nomenclature distinguishes between occupants’ presence and behavior, states and actions, adaptive triggers, non-adaptive triggers, and contextu...

Recent high profile developments of autonomous learning thermostats by companies such as Nest Labs and Honeywell have brought to the fore the possibility of ever greater numbers of intelligent devices permeating our homes and working environments into the future. However, the specific learning approaches and methodologies utilised by these devices have never been made public. In fact little inf...

The objective of this study is to evaluate occupant posture change during pre‐impact braking and explain the effects of a motorized seatbelt (MSB) on occupant restraint. In order to simulate the pre‐impact condition, low‐speed sled tests on young adult male volunteers were conducted with a vehicle seat, a seatbelt and a foot rest. In this study, two seatbelt systems and two muscle tone ...

The objective of this study is to investigate the effects of obesity on occupant responses in frontal crashes using whole-body human finite element (FE) models representing occupants with different obesity levels. In this study, the geometry of THUMS 4 midsize male model was varied using mesh morphing techniques with target geometries defined by statistical models of external body contour and e...

In an effort to develop occupant protection standards for future crewed spacecraft, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has been investigating the test device for human occupant restraint (THOR) dummy in relevant impact test scenarios. In this study, the biofidelity of THOR and total human model for safety (THUMS) finite element (FE) models were evaluated against a series o...

Energy inefficiency and underlying occupant discomfort associated with building thermal management systems have led to development of human-in-the-loop control system. Minimizing total energy consumption and maximizing comfort of all the occupants present is the major objective of such system based on human comfort feedback. However, the approaches proposed so far lack a built-in mechanism to e...

Occupancy sensors have the potential to significantly reduce energy use by switching off electrical loads when a normally occupied area is vacated. While occupancy sensors can be used to control a variety of load types, their most popular use has been to control lighting in commercial buildings. Manufacturers claim savings of 15% to 85%, although there is little published research to support th...

Frontal crashes can be classified as full, offset, or small overlap impacts. Although the former two impacts have received considerable attention in crashworthiness and promulgation of worldwide standards, small overlap crashes have undergone limited analyses from field and laboratory investigation perspectives. The objective of the present study was to analyze small overlap impacts using data ...