When the British Standards Institute's National Engineering Lab captured on film the gruesome fall of a lifelike dummy in a body belt, European regulatory agencies, starting with the French, advised employers to replace belts with harnesses. The image of the dummy almost folded in half by the belt, with the head and upper torso dipped down and slammed into a surface, spurred them on. That was 23 years ago.
U.S. regulators didn't get around to considering the issue until much later. In the mid-1980s, OSHA asked engineers at Wright Patterson Airforce Base in Dayton, Ohio, to determine how long a motionless worker, knocked unconscious in a fall, could survive suspended in a body belt before being retrieved by rescue workers.