Human-Centered Smart Safety Sustainability Index (HS3I): A Novel Framework for Evaluating Human Safety in Intelligent Automated Vehicles

Abstract

The deployment of intelligent automated vehicles (AVs) introduces in-cabin hazards that have received limited systematic attention: entrapment, crushing, and pinch-point injuries produced by powered mechanisms such as folding electric seats. Children, elderly occupants, and disabled persons are disproportionately exposed, yet no composite, human-centered metric exists to evaluate the protective performance of these mechanisms holistically. This paper introduces the Human-Centered Smart Safety Sustainability Index (HS3I), a five-dimensional framework integrating Human–Machine Interaction Quality, Proactive and Predictive Safety Performance, Perceived Psychological Safety, Operational Reliability and Risk Mitigation, and Social Equity and Accessibility in Safety. A Vulnerable Human Factor (VHF) parameter enables adaptive threshold scaling. A four-sensor fusion architecture embedded in a five-layer decision stack was evaluated through MATLABR2026a simulation of a child-occupant entrapment scenario, augmented by Monte Carlo sensitivity examination (27,000 runs) and biomechanical benchmarking. The final HS3I score is 0.898 (95% confidence interval [0.873, 0.923] from 27,000 Monte Carlo simulation runs).