WP3 aims to understand the travelling conditions of children in cars and the main issues in terms of lack of protection in case of collision. This includes new work items in order to give a more complete overview of the safety issues and provide data and information to WP1 and WP2 as basis for their work and to WP4 who is in charge of proposing novel CRS solutions. The work package is organised in 3 tasks.
Within task 3.1 the condition children travelling in cars are investigated. This analysis includes field studies, questionnaires and focus groups. While the first item should allow to describe how children are travelling in cars the two latter items shall help to understand why children are travelling as they do. One very important question is how cultural differences influence the safety behaviour of parents. Finally the influence of misuse on the injury risk will be analysed by a testing programme. The task is accompanied by a misuse ad-hoc group which is organised based on shared data. That means that every organisation which could contribute by field or test data is invited to participate to the ad-hoc group.
Task 3.2 aims at the collection of real world accident data of children travelling in cars to understand the influence of new car and CRS design (e.g., ISOFIX which has not been visible in accident data so far) and to analyse the causation of fatalities. Task 3.2 gives input to WP1 and WP2 by accident case descriptions for reconstruction. Additionally the accident data will be used within WP4.
As reconstruction of accidents involving children as car occupants is connected with undesirable uncertainty with respect to the accident itself, the quality of fixation of the CRS, the quality of restraining the child etc., the aim of task 3.3 is to collect other accident data for reconstruction of accidents with children. These other accidents include bicycle and pedestrian impacts and mainly domestic accidents. These accident reconstruction shall help to validate the various dummy and human-like models from WP1 and WP2 and to contribute to the construction of injury risk curves. The most important selection criteria for this new kind of data is that the accidents are simple to reconstruct and that the injury mechanism is comparable to one observed for car occupants.
