Recently, airbag systems have been introduced to supplement the seat b
elt system primarily to reduce head injuries. Most of the present airb
ag systems use distributed mechanical sensors, which are costly, not e
asy to calibrate, and not effective to trigger the airbag on time for
different types of crashes. An electronic sensor is more effective in
the sense that the signal from the accelerometer can be digitized and
analyzed to study the behavior of the signal for different types of cr
ashes, Unfortunately, most of the algorithms which are used for electr
onic sensors still have some problems. They either fail to trigger the
airbag on time for several types of high speed crashes such as pole a
nd angle crashes, or if they do trigger at these crashes they also tri
gger at low speed barrier crashes. A new algorithm for an electronic s
ensor is presented in this paper. This algorithm has been developed by
analyzing a large volume of data obtained from actual crash testing e
xperiments, The algorithm works for all types of crashes. The algorith
m has been tested by applying it on real crash testing data, A hardwar
e circuit has also been proposed in the paper, which can be used to im
plement the algorithm for real-time operations.