Development of a performance calibration system for X-26 tasers

Conducted Energy Weapons (specifically the Taser) are being increasingly used by police in several countries, and have also been subject to significant media concern over the level of emissions and applicable safety standards. One issue has been the variability in electrical output between weapons, and of individual weapons over time. In order to address this issue, we present work to: 1) establish consensus on the appropriate electrical parameters to characterize a weapon's biomedical effects, and 2) the development and design of a portable test system to measure these parameters. A weapon is electrically connected to a calibrated dummy resistive load of 600 ohms and fired for 5s while the output voltage is measured and the parameters are subsequently calculated. This test system has been used to characterize 256 shots from 84 weapons over 8 test episodes spanning 16 months.