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The automotive seat has undergone significant advancements in technology due to changing customer demands, levels of autonomy and vehicle regulations. These advancements have presented both opportunities and challenges in creating a pleasant experience for customers by ensuring optimal seat comfort and a joyful human experience. Seats are always being built to accommodate different percentiles of occupant comfort requirements; original equipment manufacturers come up with various seating adjustment features. However, there is considerable variation among each percentile of occupants in how they utilize these features to achieve a comfortable seating position based on their unique preferences and circumstances. Additionally, there are variations in occupant postures due to the ways people have adapted their driving habits or styles when it comes to the way they sit.

Seat mounted side impact airbags (SIAB) along with side curtain airbags are now a standard passive safety equipment offered by nearly all original equipment manufacturers (OEM) to meet side protection requirements in many regions of the world. While the side curtain airbag is intended to reduce head injury, the SIAB protects the thorax and abdomen region of the driver or passenger in a side crash scenario. An optimized SIAB both in terms of design and deployment threshold has the potential to reduce occupant’s injury level and can prevent fatalities. Because of the limited space available between the occupant and the side structure of the vehicle, there are significant challenges posed for packaging a SIAB to provide adequate cushioning distance from the intruding parts of the vehicle side structure and spread the impact load over a larger area. Different regulatory requirements in different geographies add further challenges for a common design.