Evaluation of wearable airbags for elder fall-protection

Abstract

J-H. WANG, J-L. LIN. Evaluation of wearable airbags for elder fall-protection. Gerontechnology 2014;13(2):298; doi:10.4017/gt.2014.13.02.281.00 Purpose Recently, airbag simulations have been commonly used for vehicular applications. The inflation of airbags and resultant interactions with an occupant have been successfully investigated in previous studies1-3. However, few studies have been conducted on a wearable airbag designed to provide fallprotection for older people. Method In this study, we propose an air inflation model for an optimally designed wearable airbag for older people. Figure 1 shows an air-inflated model that is used for the prediction of the inflating process of a wearable airbag with respect to the mass flow rate, the inflating volume and the inflating temperature. Results & Discussion Figure 2 shows the experimental results of the inflation process of the wearable airbag. The advantage of numerical airbag simulations is that they shorten the design process and reduce the number of experiments that are needed to develop to a reliable and safe product. The airbag model results were in reasonable agreement with the experimental observations. Therefore, this study presented is a promising method for optimal design of wearable airbags.