Ali Akbarian: Okay, good afternoon. Ali Akbarian here from Mobility Engineering, senior engineer, and go to road safety expert for child restrains in disabled restrains in Australia. So, today what we are starting to do as of today is that launching our very first question and answer series videos, and basically, we get a lot of questions and a lot of inquiries throughout our emails and phone calls. So, we thought rather than just giving the answer to one person, we can produce a little video, provide you with the question, give you the answer, and then this can hopefully help with more information and more clarity to our laws and regulations into an area which is a little bit gray sometimes.

Okay, so the first one, the question that came in just today, came from Sarah, and what she's written here is we attended your presentation at the Sydney ATSA expo. Thanks very much for attending. And one particular point I took from it was the possibility of using type G car seats for children with disabilities.

So, before I read the rest of the question, a type G car, our seat is a child seat that looks like this with inbuilt straps and a crutch buckle in between your legs. And essentially it is designed to accommodate you from approximately six months of age, all the way to approximately roughly about seven to eight years of age. And it does that by moving the adjustable headrest. So, if I move this to the tallest position, what you on see there is a quite a large seat and we'll be able to accommodate quite a large person up to an average eight-year-old child.

So, what Sarah has written is our son is three and suffers from a neuromuscular condition making the longer use of the harness appealing. So, that is the fact that this is a very long harness. The seats, how do not address issues relating to the positioning of his spine. Is modifying the off-the-shelf type G seat to have any, to say, have wedges or anything else to keep our little boys straight, reasonable, or should we just bite the bullet and purchase, for instance, a cap car seat? If modifications are reasonable, do you have any you who we could contact we're in Victoria?

So, first of all, in terms of who you can contact, our organization has got deals all over the country just go to our website and contact. You can see the section where we can, we've got installers and resellers and dealers all over the country there are about 65 of them currently, and we should have more. So, the first thing I'll cover is can you modify this restraint legally or not? Generally speaking, we don't want to modify restraints if we don't have to.

However, there is an Australian standard for child restraints or restraining children with disabilities or medical conditions in motor vehicles, which is AS 4370, 2013. I'll just show you that there. So, this standard is free. I just downloaded this before from SAI global website or standards Australia website. And this particular document gives you guidelines on how to choose the right restraint, and how to modify restraints, and what you can and can't do. So, we've got a few different points here about what you can and can't do in terms of modifying restraints. As I said, in general, the rule of thumb, the approach that you want to take in terms of modifying restraints is to try not to modify them, but if you have to, while everybody's different, everyone's slightly got different needs, and you can. Now we talk about this type G restraint, a fair bit, it's quite a large restraint, and it is basically got quite a bit of I guess, growth available in it, and quite a bit of flexibility because of that for this industry.

So, the common things that people generally ask for are things like the longer Cru straps, or what Sarah's asked for is padding. Now padding is generally not a concern. Padding is generally okay, in general, the way you got to approach this kind of stuff, and padding is typically the best way to do it is to not interfere in the existing capability and function of the seat. So, this particular seat has got straps and a buckle that holds you in, as long as you're not stopping that from doing what supposed to be doing in general, it should be okay. So, if you need to put a piece of padding in there, you want to put it in under the covers so sometimes you might need to pull the covers back, you might need to wedge it in and basically feel out for what you need to do and get the right support in the section that you need, and you might need to just wedge it in place.

Things like buckle guards, extra straps, they're all possible as well, to help further secure or for behavioral issues, and so on. However, those kinds of things, you really need to take a lot of caution with that stuff, because anything additional to this, don't forget, this is used for the purpose of an accident and to protect you in an accident. So, if you have an accident often you might need to eject out the vehicle, or remove yourself out of the vehicle, or escape out of the vehicle very quickly. So, one simple red button, yeah might be pretty easy to get you out, but once you start putting in buckle covers, and straps and all these different things and bits and pieces, it might get very difficult for you to get out.

So, be very careful how you modify the restraint. Now, in terms of Sarah's question, in terms of the padding, that's pretty easy, and that's typically quite a common thing. It's very important that you do discuss this with your therapists, or the physios or whoever is that you are working with. Don't just go and add padding in there willie Nilly thinking that it's the right thing to do. Often, we think that we are doing the right thing, but we need to speak to the people that are trained in those areas of our body to see what is going to be the best thing for the body.

So, in general, so moldings, we don't really want to modify any straps, as we said, we talked about it and restraining the head so this is another common one where we get people to want to restrain the head. Now, again, similar to the other devices that I'm talking about, buckle guards restraining ahead is.... well, the head, obviously the very, very sensitive part of our body, and we want to really, really avoid that if we have to. Again, as I said, anything is possible, you might have to do it if you need to, but if you do think that you need to restrain ahead, just take another couple of questions and a couple of seconds and basically really review to see, is there any alternate options? Is there anything on the market that's maybe being tested that can actually take this device?

So, don't just talk to one person seeking all the answers out, do your research, Google search, do whatever you need to do then you'll find all the answers there. So, thank you very much for listening to our first question answer. And I'm hoping that we'll get better and better as we go along. Please send in your questions we're more than happy to answer. Thank you.