This site is about a new child restraint concept for booster-age children.
It’s about providing children from five to ten with the same measure of collision protection as the rest of us : infants and children to the age of four have car seats with five-point harnesses ; adults have lap-and-shoulder seat belts and multiple air bags.
Children five and older have only the adult seat belts to restrain them, whether they are in a booster seat or not.
They are better off not.
This may come as a shock because it is not what booster seat advocates are telling us.
Adult lap-and-shoulder seat belts are not ideal child restraints when used alone, but a child in a booster seat is at a 52 per cent greater overall risk of serious (AIS 2+) injuries – including a 157 per cent greater risk of serious head injury – than when using seat belts alone, according to recent analysis of U.S. collision data conducted at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) School of Public Health.
Children will be at risk for as long as they climb trees and play hockey in the street. The benefits of childhood heroics outweigh their risk.
The risks inherent in most booster seats outweigh any benefit. The high-back booster seat creates an illusion of security but offers no protection to the child. It is not a child restraint. It’s little more than a little armchair – a redundant seat on top of a seat – which raises and advances the child, increasing the risk of her impact with the car’s interior.
The high-back booster seat is to child car safety what a steady diet of Chicken McNuggets is to proper nutrition : it’s a comfort, but it isn’t what a child really needs.
What a child really needs – to have the same odds of surviving a car crash as her parent or younger sibling – is a child restraint appropriate to her size and stage of development.
The Pelmet is a new child car restraint concept and is the subject of a 2018 Letters Patent (U.S.).
Its design is based on the essential parameters of collision protection for children ; its development was guided by the techniques and applied mechanics of F1 driver protection.
It improves upon the belt-positioning booster seat in no less than ten (10) different ways.