The safety of our children is paramount in the lives of any parent. Few places require the implementation of safety measures more than modes of transport including personal vehicles and airplanes. Adults are relatively protected by seat belts and dispensed airbags in cases of collision. However, owing to their intense and sudden deployment, airbags are not a viable safety measure for youngsters.
Luftikid understands the issues involved with such a need for safety and the shortcomings of any current methodology applied. For that reason, they attempt to fill the gap in safety measures with the Luftikid inflatable child seat.
What is Luftikid?
Luftikid is an airbag-like inflatable child support mechanism that can be used in cars with lap and three-point belts for children between the ages of 9 months and 7 years olds (or a weight range of 9 to 25 kg) as per the recommendations from the manufacturer. Younger children (under 4 years old) also need to use the seat with an inflatable add-on back portion. This back portion should also be used in cases when Luftikid is utilized on an airline seat. The system can also be utilized on public transport (buses, commuter trains, shuttles, etc.), taxis, and RVs.
Benefits
Traveling with a young child is challenging enough, without the added hardship of having to struggle with clipping the child’s seat in and out. This can often be a tough process, especially in smaller vehicles or those where the inner seat restraint clips are hard to get at and are often tough to unclip if the seat needs to be moved. This becomes an especially undue burden when traveling with a child long distances on trains or planes. Dragging a child’s seat through the airport and installing it in a tight airplane row is the last thing any parent wants to deal with while trying to take care of the child.
Luftikid lightens that burden (literally) by affording a solution that can be compactly packaged in a light transport bag with a 25cm diameter and 33cm in height. It can be rapidly inflated (in under 40 seconds, and deflated easily when it isn’t needed. It works for attachment with any standard belt systems in cars (lap or three-point). In terms of weight, it is easily portable as it weighs a mere 1kg, adding very little to the weight of the typical necessary items of traveling with a young child.
There are other benefits as well. Kids can be messy between crumbled snacks, spills, and coloring on surfaces. Most cleanups with traditional child seats require the strenuous process of vacuuming nooks and crannies, or peeling away the cloth layers for a wash, then struggling to fit that cloth cover back on just the way it was. With Luftikid a simple wipe down with a soap and water solution cleans the product up quickly.
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Spills and stains are inevitable, but they do not harm the product as they can be easily cleaned so the product can enjoy a nice, long-term use, while fabric or leather will retain the remnants of the spills.
Children don’t often sit still in the back, and providing them a way to entertain themselves requires additional effort. For instance, they could use a coloring book or a tablet, though one of the inherent problems with traditional seats is that they do not provide a place to put the entertainment, which can sometimes slip out of a child’s grasp and slide away out of their reach. Reaching for these to soothe the upset child after the fact is not conducive to driving safety. The Luftikid provides a surface to accommodate the convenient placement of these entertainment methods.
It also gives the child a good place to fall asleep. Conventional child seats do not typically have a place for a child to put their head, especially when they are in a forward-facing position. This causes their head to droop forward as they sleep, which could be dangerous especially in case of a sudden stop or a crash. In that same regard, the front portion of the Luftikid serves as a safe airbag equivalent that can mitigate injury to the child without an airbag expanding in front of them rapidly.
Technical Features
The crash-tested Luftikid product is comprised of military-grade material that meets MPA standards (Germany), achieving a safety standard that exceeds expected safety values and provides a solid base for high-performance.
The airbag like quality of Luftikid reduces the stress of an impact in a head-on collision or caused by a sudden stop, reducing the chances of whiplash by protecting the head and neck of the child.
Luftikid recognizes that any inflatable product can be susceptible to varying air pressures depending on the ambient temperatures. For that reason, Luftikid is equipped with a pressure gauge that can provide the necessary air content information to the user in order to help them optimally maintain air pressure in the Luftikid product.
Purchasing
The Luftikid product, the first inflatable child seat suitable for cars, public transport, and airplane, is approved for children between 9 months and 7 years old as a certified transport mode under the ECER44*4 European regulation standards.
Startup
A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship refers to all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that never intend to become registered, startups refer to new businesses that intend to grow large beyond the solo founder. At the beginning, startups face high uncertainty and have high rates of failure, but a minority of them do go on to be successful and influential. Some startups become unicorns; that is privately held startup companies valued at over US$1 billion.
Actions
Startups typically begin by a founder (solo-founder) or co-founders who have a way to solve a problem. The founder of a startup will begin market validation by problem interview, solution interview, and building a minimum viable product (MVP), i.e. a prototype, to develop and validate their business models. The startup process can take a long period of time (by some estimates, three years or longer), and hence sustaining effort is required. Over the long term, sustaining effort is especially challenging because of the high failure rates and uncertain outcomes. Having a business plan in place outlines what to do and how to plan and achieve an idea in the future. Typically, these plans outline the first 3 to 5 years of your business strategy.
Design principles
Models behind startups presenting as ventures are usually associated with design science. Design science uses design principles considered to be a coherent set of normative ideas and propositions to design and construct the company's backbone. For example, one of the initial design principles is "affordable loss".
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