The safety of furniture has always been one of the main focuses of standardisation, and the subject of “sharp edges” is dealt with in all European standard documents concerning furniture, whether for domestic use (EN 14749), non-domestic use, or for office storage and community places (EN 16121). These standards require that all “accessible” parts of a piece of furniture with which a person may come into contact must have rounded edges and vertices.
It is therefore necessary to verify that this potentially dangerous situation does not exist, but the standard does not indicate how to “measure” it to avoid assessments that are little more than subjective.
In recent years, however, Catas has decided to conduct a study to define an objective system for assessing and measuring the risk of injuries that a “sharp edge” can create, moving on two levels: people’s perception of the danger and the validation of a laboratory instrument that can objectively measure whether an edge is sharp and how much.
The tests carried out firstly established that most people consider edges and vertices of panels with a radius of curvature of fewer than 0.6 millimetres to be “sharp”. The second part of the project involved the laboratory implementation of an instrument that emulates a person’s finger, with a spring system that allows a known force to be applied to an evaluation pad that simulates human skin. By sliding this “roll” over the edge of a piece of furniture, exactly as if it were the finger of a hand, it is possible to detect whether the furniture is more or less dangerous.
The comparison between the two phases of this research made it possible to establish a precise correlation between the values collected, demonstrating how the instrument developed by Catas gives a “measure” of the actual dangerousness of an edge, providing laboratory technicians with a way of assessing the dangerousness of an edge or a vertex of furniture by applying a reliable, objective, repeatable and reproducible criterion.
