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Air bags have saved many lives. Nevertheless as they use pyrotechnic inflating devices, they can prove to be dangerous in some identified positional conditions. Furthermore, the strength used to inflate the bag must match the passenger morphology so as not to hurt him. Therefore morphological estimation and position monitoring is required for the Static or Dynamic Automatic Suppression of the new FMVSS208 regulation. The Faurecia BioVolume sensing system uses capacitive sensors to perform both monitoring and morphological estimation. This technology presents many advantages such as low cost and easiness of integration but presents some drawbacks amongst them is their sensibility to temperature and humidity[1]. In this paper the authors show that it is possible to get rid of the drifts induced by temperature and moisture with the three-wire probe technology[2] implemented in BioVolume.

Motor vehicle Occupant related indications such as morphology class and dynamic position are important information to be taken into account by future passive safety systems in order to increase protection of occupants. Since 1998, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has initiated the first step that will require introduction of occupant sensing means. Occupant information will have to be considered as prior in airbag deployment decision in the event of a frontal crash. A first rule that amends the occupant crash protection standard will require application of improvements in order to reduce risk of severe or fatal airbag induced injuries to occupants, particularly young children and small adults [3], [4]. This paper presents the Faurecia BioVolume sensing system which has been developed for the purpose of occupant monitoring.

The Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards No 208 now includes directives rendering the morphological estimation of passengers mandatory for Advanced Air Bag systems. The Dynamic Automatic Suppression System, which is part of the advanced air bag system uses both the morphological and positional information about the passenger to allow or prevent air bag deployment. Various solutions have been proposed to obtain these information by using for instance capacitive sensors. The response of this kind of sensors depends drastically on their distance from the passenger. This paper presents a method, now implemented in the BIOVOLUME technology developed by Faurecia in partnership with Hitachi computer products, to render those sensors independent from this distance.