Child Car Seats - Good Egg Safety App

Following a call on twitter for all Mummy and Daddy bloggers to review the new smartphone app from Good Egg Safety, here are my thoughts.  My comments here reflect my experience using the app on an iPhone 3GS.

My wife and I recently bought a new car seat for our 15 month old daughter, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, so it would be interesting to compare the advice and information we received to that contained in the Good Egg app.

The app contains six options on the main menu, I'll tackle each of these in turn:

1. Information

This section contains a few hard facts about the dangers of children not being properly restrained and also some real-life examples of when things have gone wrong.  The information is straightforward and easy to read, my only gripe would be that the real-life examples opened up in Safari rather than staying 'in-app', which meant having to exit to the home screen and reload the app to continue after each one.

2. Seat/Stage Selector

This is an excellent idea, where parents can enter their child's age and weight and the app tells them what stage seat to go for.  There is also a second page with information showing what weight/age each seat group is suitable for.

Now, I tested this inputting the following for both my children:

Child A - Age 15-24 months, weight 11-13 kg
Recommendation = Group 2 & 3

Child B - Age 2-4 years, weight 14-18 kg
Recommendation = Group 1

Now, I know quite a bit about car seats, but I don't think it needs that much to work out the problem with the recommendations I was given?  My 16 month old was recommended to be sat in a high-back booster seat using the adult seatbelt, while my 3 year old was recommended to be in a seat with a 5-point harness!  Now the recommendation for my 3 year old is correct, but there is no way my 16 month old should be out of a 5-point harness!!

I'm assuming this is a programming error that can be easily fixed, but nonetheless it is a significant oversight as some people will certainly take the word of such a respected organisation as gospel and, as all parents will know, the ill-informed playground talk that could follow might take a heck of a lot of undoing!

I also have another gripe with this section, and that is the fact that extended rear-facing (ERF) is offered as more of an afterthought than the primary option, considering significant safety benefit that it is (5x safer).  In my opinion, an organisation like Good Egg should be one of those championing rear-facing, and this app strikes me as an opportunity missed to say: "The safest option for your child is to use a rear-facing seat, however there are also forward-facing options..."

3. Seat Checking Events

This section shows where and when seat checking events are taking place, either on a map or on a calendar. There are a couple of bugs in the system here I believe - like Tyndrum being marked as on the Equator in the Gulf of Guinea?  This is a really good tool and I hope more people provide Good Egg with information about checks all over the UK, not just Scotland.

4. Good Egg Safety Retailers

I guessed this section would give a list of the retailers registered with the Good Egg scheme and show them on a map.  I could only get the map and not a list - I don't know if that is intentional or not?  Again, I think this is very useful for parents and hope that more retailers across the UK can be added - I was surprised the In Car Safety Centre at Milton Keynes wasn't on there?  Maybe there is also scope to identify retailers of ERF seats?

5. Good Egg Safety News

The news feed here is a useful tool to quickly scan through the latest news from Good Egg Safety.  No more comment needed on that one really, other than I'll wait and see if the newsletter comes through after signing up using the bar at the top :)

6. Links

Some good useful links in this section, again I'm going to bring up the lack of rear-facing information but I think you get that now ;)

Overall Opinion

I think the people at Good Egg Safety have come up with a very good idea to help parents keep their children safe in and around the car.  However, I am a bit disappointed with the execution and hope the problems can be ironed out for a new version.

Post-Script:

Since writing this I have been speaking to the lovely people at Dynamic regarding the Good Egg app and I'm pleased to report that most of my concerns have already been, or are being, addressed.

The issue regarding the seat selector had already been identified and fixed, I had obviously downloaded the app before the update had been uploaded.  I've since downloaded the updated version and can confirm it works fine.

They are also looking into how to make viewing the PDFs and returning to the app smoother and will be launching the project for England and Wales soon, so more information on checking events and retailers south of the border will become available as it is added.

It's really great to see Dynamic are so passionate about child safety, and their website is well worth a look for more information on their projects.