Pushbike Peril
Low speed bicycle crashes can badly injure — or even kill — children if they fall onto the ends of the handlebars so a team of engineers is redesigning the humble handlebar in a bid to make it safer.
Kristy Arbogast, a bioengineer at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, began the project with her colleagues after a study of serious abdominal injuries in children in the past 30 years showed that more than a third were caused by bicycle accidents. "the task was to identify how the injuries occurred and come up with some countermeasures." she says.
By interviewing the children and their parents, Arbogast and her team were able to reconstruct many of the accidents and identified a common mechanism responsible for serious injures. They discovered that most occur when children hit an obstacle at a slow speed, causing them to topple over. To maintain their balance they turn the handlebars throu
A. it is not easy to persuade manufacturers to adopt the new design
B. the team of engineers has hot found any countermeasures
C. children like to ride bicycles at a very low speed
D. a lot of children were killed in bicycle accidents in the past 30 years