ABSTRACT
To design products safe for children, we must measure and understand children's behavior quantitatively, and design products in an evidenced-based way. This paper describes a case study on evidence-based design of playground equipment for childhood injury prevention by utilizing a behavior sensing system that we developed. Our research focused on the following case and analyzed it using a child dummy and a location sensor. At a park in Kitakyushu, Japan, a five-year-old child fell from the spiral staircase of playground equipment on which she was playing in an accident that caused a kidney injury. First, to test whether the circumstances described could actually occur, we went to the accident site and conducted an experiment to reenact how the child fell using a child dummy. From the experiment, we found that the child fell backward, her shoulder struck the edge of a stair on the spiral staircase and as a result of that collision, she fell to the ground. Second, we
OVERVIEW OF ACCIDENT AND I:\"JURIES
Figure 1. The playground equipment that caused the accident.
