lucianan valenteane flannan
Kathrine Selvage
Note that Bluestorm Gear provides life jacket donning instructions with images, sewn into the back of all our inflatable PFDs. Additional information and images for donning a life jacket are provided below.
Your Bluestorm life jacket also came with a manual with donning instructions when purchased. If you need a new one, you can download it from our website by tapping the link for your respective inflatable life jacket below.
To don a Bluestorm life jacket, there are four steps to follow. To ensure safety, your vest should be worn over any clothing you plan to wear during its use. Do not wear your life jacket under any clothing, as it could lead to serious injury.
The first step to donning a life jacket is to insert your arms between the straps and the vest. Note the side with the lining, which has the donning instructions and UL label sewn into it, should be pressed against the body.
Inspect your life jacket to be familiar with your adjustment options. Some life jackets have one-side adjustment and others have dual-side adjustments. Adjust your strap to tighten, ensuring the vest fits snug on you.
Picking out a new life jacket should be fun and exciting. Not only are they for safety, but they also show off your aesthetic and how you want to look while out on the water. To help make sure you are wearing your new PFD properly, here are some common questions that users may ask when donning a life jacket.
What makes the Wingman better than inflatable belt packs?
Two Stage Donning Required - A huge advantage of the Wingman over inflatable beltpacks and waistpacks is the fact that you simply need to pull the ripcord and the Wingman instantly floats you to safety and turns you face up. Inflatable waistpacks require users to not only inflate the bladder but also then wrangle the bladder and fasten it around their neck, these additional steps can be difficult and even impossible in some emergency situations. Speed and ease of use can be the difference between life or death and the Wingman is second to none in both categories.
Does the Wingman provide any buoyancy when it is not inflated?
We like to say that the Wingman is neutrally buoyant, what this means is that if you drop the Wingman in the water it will float due to the neoprene layer. When you are wearing the vest the buoyancy is basically negligible due to the minimal amount of buoyancy provided by the neoprene.
We designed this product to be the first swimmer and surfers life jacket so it was important to us that it can be used in the water. We could make the vest an auto-inflate and that's something we'll consider down the road but that would negate what makes the Wingman truly unique for our in water applications.
The USCG doesn't approve inflatable life jackets for high impact activities like water skiing or white water rafting where there is an increased likelihood of being knocked out so those are the few water sports where the Wingman doesn't really apply.
The primary reason we created the Wingman was to get people who don't wear life jackets to wear one, if you don't wear a life jacket and are knocked out, you're in worse shape because you'll be harder to rescue. Wearing the Wingman will make an assisted rescue easier. If someone can reach you, all they have to do is pull your cord rather than risk their safety to drag you in.
Finally most people don't realize that the foam PFD's they wear aren't guaranteed to float them face up which can result in drowning if a wearer is unconscious as well. The Wingman has been tested to turn users face up from any position.
Copyright: 2021 Yang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
The study was approved by Human Research Ethics Committee for Non-Clinical Faculties of School of Mechanical Engineering, Tiangong University. All participants were verbally informed of the contents of the experiment, then signed their names to agree the experiment. The participants in the figures have given written informed consent to publish their images.
The air carrier coach platform consisted of two rows of air carrier coach class triple-seat, an experimental monitoring system, and a simulated cabin floor. The air carrier coach was purchased from commercial airlines. Seats, seat belts, life preservers, and armrests were all in good condition, fully meeting the test requirements. The experimental monitoring system was composed of two surveillance cameras, which can monitor the test process from the front and back directions. The simulated cabin floor was made of 15mm high steel plate to simulate the floor of the commercial aircraft cabin.
The preparation area was utilized to record demographic information, fill in the questionnaire, and carry out the General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB) [10]. Demographic information included name, gender, age, height, urban/rural, villager/student, and wearing glasses or not. Measurement data included weight, body fat rate, and head circumference. Weight and body fat rate of test subjects were measured by Mi Body Composition Scale 2, and head circumference was measured by laboratory staffs.
The GATB is a test compiled by the Employment Insurance Bureau of the US Department of Labor, which has excellent reliability and validity to evaluate individual flexibility [10]. To more effectively describe human flexibility, the GATB used in this paper included self-test questions and tool tests. Self-test questions consisted of nine items (general intelligence, verbal ability, numerical aptitude, spatial relation, shape perception ability, clerical awareness, motor coordination ability, finger flexibility, and wrist flexibility). Each item was composed of five questions graded on a five-level scale (1, strong; 2, just strong; 3, average; 4, just weak; 5, weak). The total score of these nine items was regarded as a self-test score, and the max self-test score was 225. Tool tests included placing tool test, turning tool test, assembling tool test, and disassembling tool test. These tests required the test subjects can complete placing task, turning task, assembling task, and disassembling task as quickly as possible, and the total time of these four tasks was regarded as the tool test time. Lower self-test score and shorter tool test time meant participants were more flexible.
A total of 151 subjects were recruited in the test, including 85 males and 66 females. Among the test subjects, 109 were undergraduates of Tiangong University and 42 were villagers near Tiangong University. None of the subjects had any knowledge of life preservers before this test.
Life preservers for the test were typical inflatable aviation life preservers used by major airlines at present. Each life preserver was composed of upper and lower chambers, straps, inflation gas reservoirs, oral inflation means, and survivor locator light.
A total of fourteen variables with seven categorical variables and seven continuous variables were considered as potential influencing factors. Seven categorical variables include gender, urban/rural, villager/student, wearing glasses, instruction condition, seat, and age group, see Table 2. Seven continuous variables include height, weight, head circumference, body fat rate, metabolic rate, self-test score, and tool test time, see Table 3. Through data consolidation, Tables 2 and 3 summarizes the demographic information of all participants. About 56.3% of the participants were male, and 43.7% were female. Test subjects included 72.2% of college students and 27.8% of villagers. Aisle seat, middle seat, and window seat all accounted for about 1/3. According to TSO-C13g [9], five age groups used in this paper were
All data analyses were performed using SPSS (v22) software. To judge whether grouping in categorical variables had a significant effect on the donning performance, T-test was used for two-level categorical variables such as gender, urban/rural, villager/student, wearing glasses, and instruction condition. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was adopted for categorical variables with three or more categories such as seat and age group. All variables were offered into the stepwise linear regression (SLR) [11] to avoid some of common problems associated. In the stepwise linear regression models, dummy variables were created for the categorical variables, using the first or lowest category as the reference category. Pearson correlation analysis [12] was also used to assess the strength of the relationship between dependent and independent variables. All tests were conducted at a significance level of 0.05.
The post-test questionnaire showed that 85.4% (129/151) of the subjects had difficulty in correctly donning the life preserver. The main obstacles included: straps, confusion on top/bottom or front/back, confusion on the hole, package problem, nervous or hesitant, retrieving problem, and confusion on the briefing card.
About 27.2% (41/151) of the subjects reported that the straps were too long for them to know how to use. They often fail to fasten the straps correctly and had to wait for the staff or the neighbor to remind them to tighten properly. About 21.9% (33/151) of the subjects were confused about what was the top/bottom or front/back so that they cannot don the life preserver quickly. About 21.9% (33/151) of the subjects complained that the hole of the life preserver was too small to see, and prevented participants with glasses to don it quickly and correctly. For the sake of unification, all packages containing life preservers were made on site. Compared with the original package, the package was made of the same material but easier to open. But 21.9% (33/151) of the subjects still complained that the package was hard to open. In the donning test process, about 18.5% (28/151) of the subjects were nervous or hesitant, because they did not know what to do when they saw the life preserver. About 7.9% (12/151) of the subjects complained that they had trouble in retrieving packages under the seat, and seat belts restrained them and prevented them from retrieving packages quickly. About 6.0% (9/151) of the subjects questioned that the pictures in the briefing card were different from the actual life preservers, and regarded the card misled them.
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