Innovative Child Restraint Harness

Abstract

Children’s car seats can be bulky, hard to move and tedious to mount. Volvo Cars has designed a lightweight and inflatable rearward-faced child seat concept. One important part of the child seat is the harness restraining the child in the child seat. Innovations within harness are limited and designed to fulfil the legal requirements rather than being user friendly. The aim of the project was to investigate and develop a new child restraint harness to increase the customer value of the child seat. The harness should be implementable in the new compact child seat concept developed by Volvo Cars. Customer experiences and values were investigated using questionnaires and a focus group meeting. Important aspects/issues were identified. Various harness concepts addressing these were evaluated and two promising concepts were produced. Key words: Child safety, child restraint system, harness, user friendliness Master’s Thesis