"Children’s Outerwear
Drawstrings and Sliding Board Safety Analysis" Dennis B. Brickman A two year old child strangled to death when the drawstrings of her jacket became lodged in a catch point hazard at the top of a residential sliding board. Approaches utilized in the safety analysis include accident reconstruction, safety literature review, standards research, an accident statistics survey, and an evaluation of alternative jacket and sliding board designs. Results of the analysis indicate there are technically and economically feasible design alternatives which prevent the child strangulation hazard associated with the jacket drawstrings and sliding board.
"Standard Infant
Crib Testing Enhanced with Live Children Shaking" Dennis B. Brickman, P.E. An infant asphyxiated when a machine screw detached from a crib, the headboard separated from the crib rod, and the infant's head stuck in the opening. The evaluation of infant cribs by inanimate standard test protocols is enhanced by live child crib shake testing. This live testing provides data for quantifying the horizontal push and pull forces that children actually apply to the sides of a crib. Comparisons are made between the live child shake test results and the inanimate test requirements contained in crib safety standards. Although the inanimate standard test protocols are inconsistent, the machine screw did not fail from normal use because the inanimate test requirements far exceed the maximum live results..
"Child Resistant Packaging - Regulations and Effectiveness, 1980-2002" Cheryl A. Pattin, Ph.D., P.E. The Poison Prevention Packaging Act (PPPA) is a federally preemptive piece of legislation covering an ever expanding group of substances. The test methods used to establish compliance with the PPPA do not address the range of substances covered (e.g. liquids); the changing patterns of use of household substances such as increased use of liquid medications for children; or repeated access to and multiple reclosures of containers common in the home situation. To examine the effectiveness of the PPPA in addressing actual poisonings in children under 5, national databases from 1980 through March of 2002 were examined. The average age of children treated in hospitals was under 2, and fatalities due to Assisted access and Transfer of contents incidents were reported in children averaging under one year of age. These age ranges are below those of children used in child resistant packaging testing (3.5 to 4.25 years). More importantly, the average body weights -- directly related to the susceptibility to poisoning injury -- of children seen in hospitals is below the toxicity threshold set in the PPPA standard which is based on a 25 pound child. Training for children, the elderly, and parents would help increase awareness of Transfer of contents and assisted access poisonings, which are disproportionately represented in fatal poisoning incidents of young children.
"Boogie Board Flexibility" Ralph Lipsey Barnett and Peter Joseph Poczynok The flexibility of a closed cell polyethylene boogie board provides a man-machine interaction that differs qualitatively from the relatively rigid surfboard. Under the action of gravity and buoyancy forces, the closed cell polyethylene boogie board exhibits very large deflections that effect the shape of its bottom control surface. This paper demonstrates how hand placement provides an additional degree of freedom for the surfer.
"Infant Pull Strength - Ability to Dislodge Crib Sheets" Ralph L. Barnett and Dennis B. Brickman The suffocation of infants caused by crib sheet entanglement appears to be a nonproblem which has nevertheless resulted in a brouhaha that has incited remediation activities by the Good Housekeeping Institute (GHI), American Society for Testing Materials (ASTM), Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association (JPMA), crib sheet manufacturers, and product liability support professionals of different stripes. To show that the removal of crib sheets by infants is not a safety issue, one may establish that the problem is not reasonably foreseeable. Three approaches for doing this are described in this paper: anecdotal, simulation, and reliability. The reliability of a crib sheet is the probability that it will remain in situ when exposed to the community of infants. Application of the classical "load minus strength" analysis required new information on the pull strength of infants.
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The Drunk, the Child and the Soldier - My, How
They Fall" Ralph L. Barnett It's better to collapse than to topple over, it's better to be short than tall and it's best not to fall at all.
"Infant Crib Failure Analysis" Dennis B. Brickman and Ralph L. Barnett The full text of this paper was published at the 51st Meeting of the Society for Machinery Failure Prevention Technology and the 12th Biennial Conference on Reliability, Stress Analysis and Failure Prevention in April 1997 and is available from Triodyne Inc. at no cost..
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