New UBC engineering course addresses gender gaps in safety equipment

A new course at UBC is putting women at the centre of injury research as it looks to challenge how engineers think about safety.

For decades, safety equipment such as seatbelts, airbags and helmets have been designed around the male body, leaving women less protected from injury.

A new course at the University of British Columbia aims to address the knowledge gap in how injuries affect women and men, and to teach future engineers to consider sex-based biological differences when designing safety equipment.

Dr. Peter Cripton, the professor behind BMEG 400X: Sex Differences in Injury Biomechanics, says the course will investigate why devices like seatbelts and airbags do not work as effectively for women.

“The thing is, women are very different than men, and a lot of the research done previously has used male surrogates like crash test dummies that represent the male body and not surrogates that represent the female body,” Cripton told CTV News.

He said that women are at a much higher risk of severe injuries and death than men in a car crash of the same severity.

Cripton added that lower extremity injuries are more common for women, which, based on his lab’s research, is because women carry soft tissue in different parts of the body, meaning seatbelts fit differently.

Cripton’s research team also used MRI and laser scans to study women at various stages of pregnancy in a model car seat.

“What we discovered is it’s impossible for women in late state pregnancy to wear the seat belt as recommended by Transport Canada or the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration,” he said, adding that car crashes are the leading cause of fetal demise compared to falls or other trauma.

“Previously, we didn’t know how sitting in a seat changed the position of the uterus, the position of the fetus, the position of the placenta,” Cripton continued.

He said the scans will be used to make computational models automakers can use to design safer restraint systems for pregnant drivers.

“It’s long overdue for us to start to concentrate on bringing equity to the safety equipment that’s available in vehicles and more broadly,” Cripton said.

He hopes the course, where students will analyze case studies and experiment with a vehicle crash simulator in the SIMON Robot Facility, will motivate more research in the field.

“The students we could see as sort of disciples of this approach,” Cripton said. “We spend a term looking into these questions, and so hopefully they’re passionate about this and in their future careers, they’re focused (on this).”