Pediatric safety: review of the susceptibility of children with disabilities to injuries involving movement related events

Abstract

Background Toy-related injuries have increased significantly in the past decade, in particular those related to ride-on toys. This increase has been attributed to movement related events such as falls and inertial impacts. Furthermore, children with disabilities have been reported to be at a greater risk of being injured, and are therefore more susceptible to toy-related injuries. Although, efforts are being made to modify ride-on toys as a method for increasing quality of life in children with disabilities, there are very limited pediatric safety studies regarding children with disabilities and modified ride-on toys. Methods This manuscript presents a systematic review of literature summarizing the current state of toy-related injuries including children with and without disabilities. Children exposed to inertial impacts in motor vehicle crashes have also been reviewed to present current pediatric safety testing methodologies and injury tolerance thresholds. Out of 2608 articles, 10 studies were included regarding current trends in toy-related injuries and safety testing methodologies. Conclusions From this study, a gap in the literature was discovered concerning the susceptibility of children with disabilities to toy-related injuries, specifically in relation to ride-on toys and the repercussion surrounding such injuries. It is theorized that such lack of data is due to the difficulty and costs associated with experimental validation. Hence, it is recommended that computer simulations be used to provide preliminary data analysis.

Effect of vehicle speed on injury of child passenger in frontal crashes

“…NHTSA threshold for child injury were obtained by scaling adult data. Knowledge of children injury thresholds is still limited due to paucity of test data as children cannot volunteer as test subject and the unavailability of cadaver data (Fraser et al 2019). Impact speed of 40 km/h was found good for 3YO child as all the injury parameters were within the limit tolerated for 3YO as shown in Table 1.…”