Novel Methodology to Detect Non-Compliant Usage of Seat Belt in a Passenger Car

Seat belts are fundamental and legally required safety feature in a vehicle. They are designed to protect occupants from fatality in the event of an accident. Seat belts, if used correctly, could significantly reduce the risk of injury and be lifesaving in accidents of varying severity. There is immense push on the technology front by automotive regulatory bodies and independent organizations like NCAP (New Car Assessment Program) enforcing motor vehicle users to wear safety belts. While there are many technological advancements like Seat Belt Reminder (SBR) system and the importance of seat belt usage cannot be more emphasized, there are still significant passenger car users who do not wear seat belts, for various underlying reasons. This paper lists different possible misuse cases that the occupant can be creative about to not wear the seat belt. We develop a sophisticated methodology that can caveat each misuse case which are not addressed by state-of-the-art techniques. For a given occupant, there is a certain length of seat belt that gets exposed outside the pillar trims while it is deployed, and this length is different when the belt is misused in a non-compliant way. The methodology uses the idea of seat belt length to classify between a use case and a misuse case. The logic derived from this methodology would be fed to the ECUs of vehicle components and alert the system and occupant about the non-compliant usage of seat belts. Keywords: Occupant Safety, Seat Belt Systems, Misuse Classification, Statistical Testing, Accident Prevention, Safety Seat Belt, Non-compliant usage, Seat Belt Reminder System, RAMSIS, Hypothesis Testing