Compliance

While the selection of components in electrical equipment plays a crucial role, a sound understanding of the characteristics of safety-critical and high-integrity components can provide valuable information about the ways to advance and achieve the safety goals.

Safety management programs are necessary to help a company make safe products and monitor safety for products in use. The CPSC has provided lots of guidances and mandates over the years on what constitutes an adequate program. These guidances are potentially useful to those companies seeking to establish a CPSC-compliant safety program and should be considered as part of the program development process.

The safety hierarchy is a flexible concept that can be helpful in deciding on a final product design. But it can also be a trap for the unwary design engineer. This article will discuss the safety hierarchy concept, how do you comply with its requirements, and what are the problems associated with it?

This article will discuss the law of misuse and some ways in which manufacturers can practically perform a risk assessment, including an analysis of product misuse.

This article will discuss the basic kinds of defects that can be alleged in any product liability case, the law as it pertains to compliance with standards, and some tips on how to deal with the issue of standards compliance.

This article discusses the legal and practical issues around the duty to design a safe product and how to decide whether various safety features that aren’t always necessary must be sold as standard features or whether they can be sold separately as options.

The way you market your product can turn an otherwise safely designed product into an unsafe product that causes injury and creates liability for the manufacturer and product seller.

This article discusses the IEC 60601 Amendments Project, for Medical Electrical Safety, some of the changes to the General and Collateral Standards of the Project, and their impact on manufacturers. The future of the 60601 series of standards is also discussed.

As the global market for LED horticultural luminaires grows, it is important for the industry to assess these products for safety and performance considerations unique to their controlled indoor agricultural environments. The industry is responding by introducing standards and programs with a variety of requirements.

This article examines how the expanded use of commercial drones will impact U.S. regulatory requirements and how the current legislative landscape might change as the market expands.