Injuries from crashes severity

Colonel Stapp, a career Air Force physician, used his own body for a lengthy series of tests over several years. His work led to a famous series of conferences on human physical tolerance and potential injuries from deceleration and automobile crashes. The conferences were called the Stapp Car Crash Conferences. ... 

The most extensive analysis of the relationship between AV and crash severity was conducted by Elvik et aL (2004). For his analysis he included the data from 97 published studies, containing 460 results of injuries at specific speeds. A table of the estimated exponent values... 

Risk is the probability of harm or loss and can be considered to be a product of the probability and the severity of specific consequences. Risk, as it relates to hazardous wastes and groundwater contamination, may be defined as the chance that humans or other organisms will sustain adverse effects from exposure to these environmental hazards. Risk is inherent in the life of all organisms—humans, animals, and plants. Tornadoes, landslides, hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters carry a risk of injury or death to any living thing in their path. Similarly, human-caused risks such as automobile accidents, plane crashes, and nuclear disasters occur with varying levels of severity. 

Securement systems are used to temporarily attach wheelchairs to vehicles during transport. Many wheelchair users can operate a motor vehicle from their wheelchair, but are unable to transfer into a vehicle seat. Auto safety standards have reduced the number of U.S. automobile accident fatalities despite an increase in the number of vehicles. The crash pulse determines the severity of the collision of the test sled, and hence, simulates real-world conditions. Securement systems are tested with a surrogate wheelchair at 30 milesper h (48 - -2/—0 km per h) witha20g deceleration. Wheelchairs must be safely restrained when experiencing an impact of this magnitude and no part of the wheelchair shall protrude into the occupant space where it might cause injury. 

The next evolution of the method presented by Busch is called PreEffect-iFGS. It is a prospective method for evaluating the field effectiveness of integral pedestrian protection systems [21]. The main procedures of Busch, i.e., selection of relevant accidents, simulation with/without system, translation into injury severity, and calculation of the effectiveness, stayed the same with some additions. The improvement is an incorporation of test results for active and passive safety systems derived from hardware testing [54]. The initial version also includes an automated backwards simulation of each accident based on the values available in GIDAS. The results are then transferred into the commercial software PC-Crash and are then simulated forward with and without the measure in question. 

The controversy and most of the research about the relationship between speed and crashes has evolved around three questions what is the relationship between the absolute speed of a vehicle and its crash likelihood What is the relationship between the deviation of a vehicle speed from the prevailing traffic speed and its crash likelihood What is the relationship between the physical severity of impact in a crash and the injury severity of the occupants ... 

Multiple independent analyses of seat belt effectiveness, using crash data from different countries, and different statistical methods have all yielded quite similar results, reducing fatalities and injuries by approximately 40-50 percent, as detailed in Table 10-1 (WHO, 2004). However, the exact numbers in the table, should be considered as potentially inflated estimates because they are based on police reports, and these are known to inflate the percent of belt use. This is because drivers - when they can get away with it - will report to the officer that they had their belt on (Li et al., 1999). Consequently as the injury severity decreases, the amoimt of over-estimation of belt use is most likely to increase. 

Finally, although we call all pedestrians vulnerable road users an age-sensitive aspect of vulnerability is frailty. Older people are more frail, and when injured are less likely to survive -either the injury itself or the post-crash treatment. This is reflected in the casualty rates, but should be more pronounced if the analysis is conducted separately on fatal crashes. Keall (1995), therefore, also conducted separate analyses of fatality and severe injury rates and the results of these analyses are plotted in Figure 15-6. These analyses further differentiated the older pedestrians from the rest of the pedestrian population. In addition, the analyses showed... 

From the perspective of the design engineer, the most important aspect of pedestrian behavior is the street crossing speed. As people age their walking speed decreases and they need more time to cross the road. Unlike car drivers, whose speed is directly related to the likelihood and severity of a crash, in the case of pedestrians, their slow speed only increases their exposure to injury. It is therefore important to know at what speeds people cross streets, and what variables affect these speeds. 

Speed is generally associated with injury severity, but it also has a consistent effect on the likelihood of a crash. The MAIDS crash investigation teams concluded that in 8 percent of the crashes the motorcycle s speed contributed to the crash, compared to only 5 percent of the crashes in which the other vehicle s speed contributed to the crash. In Spain, Lardelli-Claret et al. (2005) assessed the accident causes of all the PTW injury collisions that occurred in Spain from 1993 to 2002, that did not involve a pedestrian, and in which only one of the drivers or riders was considered culpable. With a total data base of 128,273 crash-involved mopeds and 62,005 crash-involved motorcycles, they calculated the crash risk of the culpable riders relative to that of the non-culpable riders. After adjusting for various confounding variables, they found that the factors that were most over-involved in culpable crashes were inappropriate speed (with an odds ratio of 13 for motorcycles and 10 for mopeds), and excessive speed (with an odds ratio of 7 for motorcycles and 6 for mopeds). The effects of speed in general are discussed in much more details in Chapter 8). 

In France and in most countries, crash data are provided by the police. However, police crash data suffer from under-reporting and selection bias. This underreporting varies mostly with injury severity, the presence/absence of a crash opponent and the road user type [HAU 88, ELV 99]. Crashes involving cychsts are particularly less reported [LAN 03, AMO 06]. In the Rhone Cormty (poprrlation of 1.6 million, with Lyon being the main city) a medical registry provides a second source of data, far more complete than pohce data [AMO 06]. Indeed, over the period 2004-2007, police crash data recorded about 155 injimed cychsts and the medical registry recorded 1,230 injured cychsts per year. This medical sotrrce is used here. 

SCH 09] Schneider IV, W., Savolainen P., Zimmerman K., Eiriver injury severity resulting from single-vehicle crashes along horizontal curves on rural two-lane highways . Transportation Research Record No. 2102, pp. 85-92,2009. 

One of Sam s major problems was that he had significant posttraumatic amnesia (PTA). PTA is a state of confusion and memory loss that can occur following a traumatic brain injury, and is often considered to be an indication of how severe the brain injury is. It can be anterograde, where the person has problems creating new memories after the injury has happened, or retrograde, where there is difficulty recalling events from just prior to the injury. In Sam s case, he had both. To this day, he has no memory for the period of around 2 weeks before the crash, and limited memory for around 4 months after the crash. 

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