Photo by Mike Bailey
Richard Kent, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, is redesigning automobile seat-belt retractors to help improve the safety of older drivers.
Every stage of life brings new challenges. The older we get, the more these mysterious challenges seem to intensify.
Unraveling these age-related mysteries is a daunting task, but several School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) faculty members are working with the U.Va. Institute on Aging to find potentially revolutionary remedies to health- and safety-related problems of the aged.
With the rapidly increasing size of the elderly population, there is a great sense of urgency to discover solutions. For instance, Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Richard Kent has estimated that the segment of the U.S. population that drives cars is aging one month per year. In other words, every year the average age of the total driving public notches higher by a month. “That’s really, really fast,” Kent noted.
Technical advances in safety devices can help older drivers. Right now, Kent is redesigning automobile seat-belt retractors to minimize crash-induced injuries to this population.
More than half of the accident-related injuries sustained by elderly drivers affect the chest area, where frail rib cages are vulnerable to the pressure of the cross-chest seat belt. To reduce these injuries, Kent redesigned the seat-belt spool retractors to incorporate optimized restraint parameters to protect elderly passengers.
Bringing any measure of predictability, safety and control into the lives of the elderly is a big achievement. Too often, medical patients feel “out of the loop,” explained Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering John Lach.
Lach and BP America Professor of Computer Science John Stankovic are using their ingenuity and training to explore the ways bio-information sensors can meet health needs of older people.
Lach explained that his work focuses on designing wireless wearable sensor nodes that collect data about the wearer. Currently, the external nodes are the size of a box of matches; Lach’s goal is Band-Aid-sized nodes.
This form of data collection can provide physicians with invaluable information regarding tremors and other aspects of a patient’s condition; previously, this information was measurable only by patient self-report.
Stankovic’s interest in tracking patient information through real-time external sensors may lead to a system that sends medical data via cell phones to enable more rapid diagnoses.
The sensors, though unobtrusive, “do all the work,” Stankovic said.
The potential benefits of sensor use include providing greater information access and transmission, and control to patients and family members
Indeed, all of these programs focus on improving and maintaining quality of life. As the Institute on Aging expands with the endeavors of engineers like Lach, Kent and Stankovic, everyone stands to benefit.
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