Cycling supports the independence and health of the aging population. However, elderly cyclists have an increased injury risk. The majority of injured cyclists is victim of a single-sided accident, an accident in which there is no other party involved. The aim of the project "Safe and Aware on the bicycle" is to develop guidelines for an advisory system that is useful in preventing single-sided accidents. This system is able to support the elderly cyclist; enabling the cyclist to timely adapt his cycling behaviour and improve cycling safety and comfort. For the development of such advisory system the causes of singles accidents and the wishes of the elderly cyclist must be known. First step to obtain this insight was a literature survey and an GIDAS research. Unfortunately accidentology research with GIDAS did not give the full understanding of the pre-crash situations and (especially the behaviour related) factors leading to the accident. The second step was consultation of elderly cyclist through a questionnaire (n=800), in-depth interviews (n=12) and focus group sessions (n=15). This offered complementary information and a much better understanding of the behavioural aspects. Results concern the behaviour in traffic and identify specific physical (i.e. problems looking backwards over the shoulder) and mental issues. Furthermore, the needs and wishes for support in specific cycling situations were identified. In conclusion; The GIDAS results together with the information obtained contacting the elderly cyclists enabled setting up requirements for an advisory system, which is useful in preventing single-sided accidents.
The changed focus in vehicle safety technology from secondary to primary safety systems need to evolve new methods to investigate accidents, high critical, critical and normal driving situations. Current Naturalistic Driving Studies mostly use vehicles that are highly equipped with additional measuring devices, video cameras, recording technology, and sensors. These equipped fleets are very expensive regarding the setup and administration of the study. Due to the great rarity of crashes it is additionally necessary to have a high distribution and a homogeneous distribution of subject groups. At the end all these facts are leading to a very expensive study with a manageable number of data. Smartphones are becoming more and more popular not only for younger people. Contrary to traditional mobile phones they are mostly equipped with sensors for acceleration and yaw rates, GPS modules as well as cameras in high definition resolution. Additionally they have high-performance processors that enable the execution of CPU-intensive tools directly on the phone. The wide distribution of these smartphones enables researchers to get high numbers of users for such studies. The paper shows and demonstrates a software app for smartphones that is able to record different driving situations up to crashes. Therefore all relevant parameter from the sensors, camera and GPS device are saved for a given duration if the event was triggered. The complete configuration is independently adjustable to the relevant driver and all events were sent automatically to the research institute for a further process. Direct after the event, interviews with the driver can be done and important data regarding the event itself are documented. The presentation shows the methodology and gives a demonstration of the working progress as well as first results and examples of the current study. In the discussion the advantages of this method will be discussed and compared with the disadvantages. The paper shows an alternative method to investigate real accident and incident data. This method is thereby highly cost efficient and comparable with existing methods for benefit estimation.