Safety Harness Design Project Awarded NSERC Engage Grant

March 1, 2019

We are pleased to announce the award of an NSERC Engage grant to Dr. Jean Sebastien and British Columbian based company Arc’teryx for their collaborative project aimed to improve harness design to enhance both safety and comfort. 

Harnesses are a necessary component in safety equipment for both recreational and industry settings. While their primary purpose is to provide loads to the body, an improper distribution of such loads can lead to discomfort and long-term musculoskeletal injury. Arc’teryx has patented technologies to distribute loads in a single harness strap and enhance user comfort in recreational climbing harnesses. To expand to other harness markets and maintain their high standard for safety and comfort, Arc’teryx requires more information on the load distributions between harness straps in a harness with multiple load paths onto the body which is where Dr. Blouin and his team from the Sensorimotor Physiology Lab at UBC comes in. 

The researchers at the Sensorimotor Physiology Lab will work to aid in the design of harnesses that evenly distribute loads between multiple straps on the body. They will achieve this by completing two tasks: firstly, they will develop a mathematical model to determine strap material properties and harness geometry that evenly distributes loads, and secondly they plan to prototype the harness design and measure the load distributions experimentally in a robot designed to apply loads in a range of conditions. 

While harnesses are primarily designed for safety, maximizing comfort ensures compliant use and minimizes long-term musculoskeletal complications. This has been a goal of harness design for a time and will now be a step further to realization thanks to this important funding. Providing mathematical and experimental tools for harness design, this project will help Arc’teryx remain a global leader in harnesses manufactured for both safety and comfort. 


First Nations land acknowledegement

The UBC Point Grey campus is situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm.


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