Our group is studying how road trauma injuries occur in children, and how changes to the types and design of restraints used by children can reduce serious injuries and death. Key problems include whether children use restraints correctly and whether they use restraints that are appropriate for their size. Recent findings include that rates of misuse of child restraints are high, and much of this misuse is serious enough to compromise the effectiveness of the restraints in crashes. This is consistent with the team's findings in real crashes, where appropriately restrained children who sustained serious injury were all misusing their restraints. Crash testing of these types of restraint misuse is showing how this incorrect use of restraints allow the child to move around inside the car more during a crash, thus increasing the risk of impact with the vehicle interior or other occupants during a crash, resulting in injury.
