Capacitive vehicle seat occupancy recognition system with detection of an interruption of the vehicle seat heating element

A capacitive detection system (10) for recognizing the occupancy of a vehicle seat includes a signal generating unit (12) and a signal evaluation unit (18). The vehicle seat (26) has at least one seat heating element (36) which is adapted to receive time-varying output signals from the signal generating unit (12). The signal evaluation unit (18) is adapted to generate an output signal indicating that the at least one seat heating element (36) is defective if the detected capacity of the at least one seat heating element (32) is smaller than a second predetermined threshold (C