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Tennessee Tech’s iCube helps improve child car seat safety
Officer Nick Bramlett from the Bartlett, Tennessee police department checks the installation
of a child car seat.
Anyone who has installed a child car seat knows how important it is to ensure it is
done correctly. One ongoing project by the staff at Tennessee Tech University’s iCube
has been to help make sure parents are getting it right – and to help seat manufacturers
know when a particular seat may need to be redesigned to make installation easier.
Their car seat project came about after the iCube staff partnered with other groups
to create the popular Ollie Otter Booster Seat and Seat Belt Safety Program that travels
to schools to talk to elementary students about safety. The National Safety Council
reached out to request help with another project.
“They saw the work we did with Ollie and knew that we worked a lot with technology
here and asked us to get involved,” said Amanda Powell, virtual reality producer with
iCube.
Though there is a national program to train child passenger seat technicians (CPST)
– those certified to help parents and caregivers select, use and install a correct
child restraint for their child – each state had different questions on their forms.
The National Safety Council wanted help to consolidate this and make it easily accessible
for all technicians. They wanted a national, digital car seat check form.
“What we've done, in a nutshell, is we've made the technology side happen,” said Powell.
The iCube staff created the website https://carseatcheckform.org and the accompanying app, making sure any data shared is secure and that the app
would allow technicians to work without WiFi if necessary. Any certified CPST can
log in and access the now-streamlined forms that are necessary to help ensure a child
car seat is installed correctly during an official check. This has also made it possible
to log whenever a CPST sees a car seat installed incorrectly by a parent.
“Car seat manufacturing companies and local agencies have access to this data,” Powell
said. “And if they see, for example, this one seat is always being installed incorrectly,
they can say, ‘Hey, 80 percent of the time people aren't getting this right. We need
to change the design.’ Previously, this kind of data had been floating out there with
different groups, but never in a form like this.”
Only certified CPSTs can log in and add information, but the information dashboard
is available to the public on the website. It currently displays graphs created from
more than 107,000 checks performed since 2018. The information covers child restrain
misuse, number of checks by state, location and type of seats, vehicle type and more.
Partners with Tech’s iCube on the program included the National Safety Council, National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration, AAA, Westat and National Child Passenger Safety
Board.
“We say ‘iCube: imagine, inspire, innovate.’ We find creative solutions to traditional
problems,” said Powell. “We do everything from making apps to marketing and public
policy campaigns. A lot of the projects that we do could have national impact, but
this one is definitely does.”
