Vehicle manufacturers have typically modeled seatbelt designs using standardized crash-test dummies, resulting in an awkward fit for pregnant drivers and passengers.
Dr. Peter Cripton, director of UBC’s Orthopedic and Injury Biomechanics Group, is part of an exciting collaboration with Toyota Motor North America R&D and their Collaborative Safety Research Center aiming to enhance the future design and fit of seatbelts for pregnant people.
At the heart of the research is UBC’s unique Upright Open MRI Shared Research Platform, which is able to scan anatomies of different body shapes in seated, standing and other positions. Working with the Upright Open MRI team, Dr. Cripton and his team devised a method to scan people seated in a car position and are building new three-dimensional digital representations of pregnant drivers. Stitching together multiple MRI scans, they are generating detailed representations of bones, the spine, internal organs, and various body tissues in different phases of pregnancy, and importantly, where the seatbelt overlies them.
UBC’s Upright Open MRI is the only scanner of its kind in North America dedicated to research. Leveraging the equipment and expertise of the facility’s highly qualified personnel, the research team is generating data that could inform the design and fit of seatbelts for pregnant people around the world and enhance Toyota’s digital crash injury model. And while Toyota will be the first to put the data to use, other injury biomechanics researchers will benefit from the published data, too.
Adapted from Toyota newsroom: CSRC Leads the Way for Seat Belt Research on Pregnancies