Loughborough University
Browse
Design Guidelines for pregnant Occupant safety -Accepted.pdf (932.04 kB)

Design guidelines for pregnant occupant safety

Download (932.04 kB)
journal contribution
posted on 2017-06-30, 10:07 authored by Serpil Acar, Alix M. Weekes
During pregnancy a woman’s body undergoes a considerable change in size and shape, and this can impact upon her safety during car travel. The two main issues are proper seat belt use and positioning, and steering wheel clearance. A comprehensive analysis of the questionnaire responses by pregnant women and anthropometric measurements demonstrates that the difficulties experienced can be explained by the physical changes and interactions throughout the body during gestation. Analysis of the anthropometry of pregnant women highlights that many pregnant users could easily be excluded from designs inadvertently if the design is based on males or non-pregnant females. Thus incorporation of pregnant women’s anthropometry into automotive design could reduce the exclusion rates and alleviate problems. This paper presents guidelines for the automotive industry generated from experiences and anthropometry of pregnant women, with the aim of improving safety for pregnant car occupants.

Funding

The ‘Automotive design: incorporating the needs of pregnant women’ project is funded by the EPSRC size research grant of the Innovative Manufacturing and Construction Research Centre.

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Computer Science

Published in

Journal of Automobile Engineering (Journal of IMechE Part D)

Volume

219

Issue

(7)

Pages

857 - 867

Citation

ACAR, B.S. and WEEKES, A.M., 2005. Design guidelines for pregnant occupant safety. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part D: Journal of Automobile Engineering, 219 (7), pp. 857-867.

Publisher

© The authors. Published by SAGE Journals

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2005

Notes

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part D: Journal of Automobile Engineering and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1243/095440705X28402

ISSN

0954-4070

Language

  • en