One day, vehicle safety systems could be tailored to your body like clothing.
Drivers with different body types face different risks in car accidents, and vehicle safety researchers and engineers believe the next frontier of safety focuses on catering the front seat safety system to the human behind the wheel.
At the urging of regulators in Europe and North America, automakers and their supplier partners plan to move into occupant classification ― using vehicle sensors to identify the approximate height and weight of drivers so the safety systems protect them more effectively.
A 5-star safety rating, the official metric the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration employs in the United States, has always been a standardized measure, not a personalized
one, said Erin Keating, executive analyst at Cox Automotive.
That rating only tells consumers how a vehicle performs against a defined test, not how it performs for every individual.
“We’ve accepted that thus far. So, is it perfectly fair across every body type? Probably not,” she told the Detroit Free Press. “But that’s less about intent and more about the limits of how we’ve historically measured safety.”
The auto industry is starting to move beyond those constraints, Keating said. Instead of trying to build a perfect set of dummies for every scenario, the plan is adaptive safety, where vehicle systems “sense” who is driving adjust protection accordingly.
That’s how you start to close the gap, she said, between a standardized rating and a more individualized outcome.
How adjustable can the driver’s seat be?
Vehicle restraint systems continually evolve, starting with simple seat belts that engineers augmented with energy management load limiters, according to Lisa Furton, a vehicle performance owner for occupant protection at General Motors. Airbags, too, can be configured in multistage deployments to try to adjust the energy absorption needs based on crash severity or occupant position.
Collecting accurate passenger data and adjusting vehicle protective systems accordingly is safety’s next frontier, Furton said.
“Once those technologies allow us to reliably classify the occupant who is sitting in the seat, we can then tailor the restraint system more precisely,” she said.
Human body modeling has gotten more sophisticated, but the possibility of personalized protection systems in vehicles is still years, if not decades away, according to Dr. Steward Wang, professor emeritus of surgery at the Trauma Burn Center at the University of Michigan.
“We’re still a number of decades away from getting a good human body model that can be predictive of all injuries. It’s pretty good now, but they don’t get everybody in the population,” Wang said. “You need more detailed information about what the end results are, the specific injuries that occur. The cars need to make it out there into the real world and unfortunately live people are the real crash dummies.”
Wang spent 14 years as a principal investigator for the multidisciplinary Crash Injury Research Engineering Network (CIREN), a government-industry-academia research consortium that examines the vehicles and its interior after a crash and compares that against the medical records of the passengers and outcomes.
Despite technological innovations and advancements in data collection of crashes, there is still a large difference in the pattern and severity of injuries between men and women of different sizes in the same crash conditions, Wang said. There is “no clear solution” to protect everyone equally.
“The thought is, if it is safer for some, it should be safer for most. As a physician, I treat a patient, I don’t treat a population,” Wang said. “The [weight and build] of the drivers and occupants are critical to determining how they fare, and there’s a substantial portion of the population that’s overweight or obese.”
Still, Wang agrees that getting more body types involved in the crash test scenarios that automakers have to pass could improve safety.
If the driver isn’t secure because their body type does not allow them to sit behind the wheel the same way a dummy does, the vehicle “doesn’t know,” Wang said. And without advanced sensor technology and some degree of artificial intelligence, a vehicle, “can’t know.”
“There are technologies, but they’re not completely reliable, especially if they’re trained on a limited number of test subjects,” he said.
Without real world experience of the injuries caused in accidents, engineers won’t know if a safety feature works the same across different populations.
“Engineers are just given a number that they have to get on a test to pass. They don’t understand what the number, or test, is supposed to represent from an injury prevention perspective,” Wang said. “To them, an injury is just another injury, but among medical professionals, there’s a huge difference in the morbidity and mortality of each one.”
Too tailored creates problems
While there is always room for improvement, it is worth noting how far vehicle safety systems have come to address most body type behind the wheel, said Jessica Jermakian, senior vice president for vehicle research at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an auto insurance-funded safety organization.
“It kinda makes me nervous and a little bit frustrated when I see in media reports that women aren’t protected in crashes. They are protected. What we’re ultimately looking for is not an individual restraint system tailored to each individual person ― though the Holy Grail would be one that is somewhat adaptable ― but one that is generally robust, that even when it doesn’t perform perfectly like the crash test, it’s still doing a good job.”
Automakers can’t jump to changing vehicle designs until there’s better evidence that those changes are needed.
Jason Hallman, senior manager of Toyota’s Collaborate Safety Research Center, said that today’s vehicles rely on a robust system that covers a broad spectrum of the population generally.
More data needs to be collected, analyzed and verified before making adjustments to the vehicles themselves, he said.
“We want to be very, very certain about what that person needs if we’re going to adapt it. We don’t want to make determinations unless we have very reliable, very high performative occupant classification,” he said. “We need to develop new tools and new restraint designs that have these more tunable features, especially if we want to really start to cover a wide breadth of population in different ways.”
Jackie Charniga covers General Motors for the Free Press. Reach her at jcharniga@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: How car sensors that know everything about you could one day save you
