OBJECTIVE This study was designed to characterize the restraint use of children in fatal crashes and to determine factors that were related to child restraint use. METHODS Crashes in which a vehicle occupant died were selected from the 1994 Fatal Analysis Reporting System data. Restraint use of children (0-9 years) in these crashes was characterized and examined in relation to vehicle and dri...

Occupant behavior can significantly influence the operation and performance of buildings. Many occupant-centric key indicators (KPIs) rely on having accurate counts number occupants in a building, which is very different to how occupancy information currently collected majority buildings today. To address this gap, authors develop standardized methodology for calculation percent space utilizati...

Digital human modeling (DHM), as a convenient and cost-effective tool, is increasingly incorporated into product and workplace design. In product design, it is predominantly used for the development of driver-vehicle systems. Most digital human modeling software tools, such as JACK, RAMSIS and DELMIA HUMANBUILDER provide functions to predict posture and positions for drivers with selected anthr...

Automobile crashes are the largest cause of death for pregnant females and the leading cause of traumatic fetal injury mortality in the United States. A previously validated MADYMO computer model of a 30-week pregnant occupant was used in this study to investigate the pregnant occupant response in a severe frontal motor vehicle crash. This study presents simulations of 26 different severe car c...

The primary consumers of building energy are heating, cooling, ventilation, and lighting systems, which maintain occupant comfort, and electronics and appliances that enable occupant functionality. The optimization of building energy is therefore a complex problem highly dependent on unique building and environmental conditions as well as on time dependent operational factors. To provide comput...

Developed in the early 1980’s, the flail space model has become the standard method for estimating occupant risk in full-scale crash tests involving roadside safety features. The widespread availability of airbags and increased seat belt usage rates in today’s vehicle fleet, however, raise serious questions regarding the validity of the model. Recent implementation of Event Data Recorder (EDR) ...

OBJECTIVE A 3-phase real-world motor vehicle crash (MVC) reconstruction method was developed to analyze injury variability as a function of precrash occupant position for 2 full-frontal Crash Injury Research and Engineering Network (CIREN) cases. METHOD Phase I: A finite element (FE) simplified vehicle model (SVM) was developed and tuned to mimic the frontal crash characteristics of the CIREN...

Efforts have been devoted to the identification of the impacts of occupant behavior on building energy consumption. Various factors influence building energy consumption at the same time, leading to the lack of precision when identifying the individual effects of occupant behavior. This paper reports the development of a new methodology for examining the influences of occupant behavior on build...

Occupant satisfaction with indoor environmental quality (IEQ) in office buildings has been positively correlated to self-estimated job performance and, potentially, to overall company productivity. LEED is a voluntary, consensus-based, market-driven program that provides third-party certification of green buildings, contributing to promote sustainability into the mainstream of building design a...

In recent years, the development of airbag system has improved the safety of the occupants. However, the car occupant can be often killed by improper airbag operation. Robust detection of vehicle occupant posture is necessary for a safer intelligent airbag deployment system. This paper presents a stereobased method of estimating the posture of the occupant. Utilizing the disparity images and th...