CES 2016: Meet the self-installing child seat
US company solves the problem of incorrectly fitted child seatsLike assembling IKEA furniture, fitting a child seat to your car can be a real challenge.
Research in the US proves that most American’s aren’t up to task, backing the finding by Australian motoring clubs that 70 per cent of child seats are incorrectly fitted, putting infants at increased risk of injury in a collision.
Mara McFadden from 4Moms claims four out of five child seats are installed incorrectly in the US, and that every day 25 million American children are riding around in a car seat that’s insecurely installed.
To address that problem, 4Moms has developed and will begin marketing in June a self-installing child car. It was revealed at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
“We designed a base and carrier with an app that walks you through step by step to try to error-proof the process,” said McFadden.
For instance, she says that a lot of parents don’t realise that the car needs to be level before the child seat is installed.
The app, which runs on Apple or Android phones, measures if the car is level. “It measures the ground you’re actually on at the moment,” explains McFadden, demonstrating the process with her Samsung mobile phone.
“The phone sends that data to the device (via Bluetooth) and it compensates for the angle of the ground you are on.”
Once the base is latched into place, it tensions robotically. McFadden claims the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration specifies 5.5kg to 6.5kg of force for installation.
“We have the advantage of being a robot to easily double that tension,” she says, and that means the base is more secure and less likely to move if the car is involved in a collision.
“From then on every single time you drop the carrier into the base, it runs a complete self diagnostic so it is checking the latches, the level, the tension,” she mentions.
Unfortunately, the US does not share the same federal standard regulating child car seats with Australia, which has adopted Europe's ISOFIX standard.
Nevertheless, 4Moms' self-installing child seat is a clever idea that The Wall Street Journal chose as one of its top 10 picks of CES.
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