Recent research revealed that greater proportion of heavier male occupants and lighter female occupants sustain serious injuries in frontal crash. The cause is thought that the frontal occupant restraint systems are designed to minimize the injury risk for 50 h percentile occupant only, and its characteristics are not adjustable. In this study, vent hole area of the airbag and load limiter forc...

CONTEXT A car occupant could be killed if struck by another occupant who was catapulted forward, backward, or sideways in a crash. OBJECTIVE To estimate the association between death of a car occupant (the target) and restraint use by other occupants. DESIGN Matched-pair cohort study comparing the outcomes of 2 target occupants in the same passenger car that crashed. SETTING United States...

Heating, ventilation, air conditioning (HVAC) systems are significant consumers of energy, however building management systems do not typically operate them in accordance with occupant movements. Due to the delayed response of HVAC systems, prediction of occupant locations is necessary to maximize energy efficiency. In this paper we present two approaches to occupant location prediction based o...

In this paper, we proposed an occupant detection system using single video camera and a distance sensor for an advanced airbag deployment. We detected occupant face using skin color and motion information in real time. The proposed method acquired the color and size of the occupant face using single video camera and calculated the distance information between the occupant and airbag using a dis...

This paper presents an estimate of the probability of serious occupant injury in frontal crashes based on vehicle kinematics information. Occupant injury risk is developed by modeling the human as a point mass and computing the occupant impact velocity (OIV) using the flail space model. Event Data Recorder data provide vehicle kinematics information for real world crashes with known injury outc...

HVAC systems are significant consumers of energy, however building management systems do not typically operate them in accordance with occupant movements. Due to the delayed response of HVAC systems, prediction of occupant locations is necessary to maximize energy efficiency. In this paper we present an approach to occupant location prediction based on association rule mining, which allows pred...

An Australian Standard for Wheelchair Occupant Restraint Assemblies for Motor Vehicles has been produced. Titled Australian standard 2942-1987, Wheelchair Occupant Restraint Assemblies for Use in Motor Vehicles, it establishes design and performance requirements for these restraints, and includes details of dynamic testing procedures. Under the Standard, a lap belt is the basic occupant restrai...

In this work we propose a framework for incorporating occupant feedback towards temperature control of multi-occupant spaces, and analyze it using singular perturbation theory. Such a system would typically have to accommodate occupants with different temperature preferences, and incorporate that with thermal correlation among multiple zones to obtain optimal control for minimization of occupan...

Optimal performance of future adaptive restraint systems will require an accurate assessment of occupant characteristics including physical properties and pre-collision behavior of the occupant. This study is aimed at evaluating the sensitivity of frontal collision induced injuries to occupant state parameters: stature, mass, and pre-collision postural orientation. A numerically modeled restrai...

Robust detection of vehicle occupant posture is necessary for intelligent airbag deployment. This paper presents a vision-based method of estimating the size, posture and pose of the occupant. Utilizing raw reflectance and stereo disparity images, this algorithm presents a mixed-mode approach to finding occupant features. Extensive experiments show the robustness of this mixed-mode method in id...