The effects of mobile electronic device use in influencing pedestrian crossing behaviour

Mobile phone distraction is a global issue in road safety perspective especially involving the pedestrians. A lot of research findings had suggested that the use of mobile phone increase the risk for pedestrians while crossing the road, but there have been very few studies that could explain the said threat in Malaysia’s situation. This study aims to identify the distracted pedestrian behaviour via the video recording method. More than 300 samples were observed as involved in mobile phone distractions while crossing the roads from a total of approximately 1,500 analysed samples. The study also found that the highest mode of distraction observed among pedestrians was the “handheld usage” (conversing) as compared to the “hands-free” and “application usage” modes. In addition, the distractions had significantly affected the time to cross and the observed road users who were involved in “application usage” took longer time to cross. These results provide a prevalence material that may be useful in the development of countermeasures.

An anthropometric comparison of current anthropometric test devices (atds) with Malaysian adults

Anthropometric Test Devices (ATDs) of different nominal percentile values have long been used as human surrogates in automotive crash testing. The Hybrid III family, which is one of the widely used ATDs in frontal crash test, was designed based on the anthropometry dimensions of US adults. Thus, this paper aims to assess the anthropometric differences between Malaysian adults and Hybrid III dummies in terms of 5th percentile (small female), 50th percentile (midsize male) and 95th percentile (large male). A series of anthropometric parameters of Malaysian adults was obtained from a database of 1321 subjects with 708 males and 613 females. The results revealed that the current midsize male population differs from the ATD’s statures and body weights by about 35 and 40 percentile points, respectively. This demonstrates that the current ATDs are not truly representative of the current Malaysian adults, which may potentially lead to different injury responses in road traffic crashes. Thus, car manufacturers may as well consider this discrepancy issue in developing their future models especially with regards to safety.