Sonstige
Filtern
Sprache
- Englisch (58) (entfernen)
Schlagworte
- Schweregrad (Unfall, Verletzung) (58) (entfernen)
Institut
- Sonstige (58) (entfernen)
The fact that ADAC Air Rescue handles approximately 4,000 road accident missions every year gave rise to set up an accident research programme for which ADAC Air Rescue provides its data. This data is of initial informational quality and will be supplemented by data from the police, experts, fire brigades as well as hospitals and forensic institutes. Although the number of cases is still rather low, certain tendencies can be identified. The causes for most accidents occur when joining or intersecting traffic, followed by speeding in road bends and tailgating. Many accidents involve HGV rear end collisions, often causing serious injuries, considerable damage and technical problems for the rescue operations. With regard to the various impact types, it has become obvious that most of the extremely serious injuries are inflicted during a passenger car side impact. In addition, access to and removal of trapped passengers is becoming more and more complicated, partly due to the increasing use of high-strength materials, and rescue operations tend to be more time consuming.
Annually within the European Union, there are over 50,000 road accident fatalities and 2 million other casualties, of which the majority are either the occupants of cars or other road users in collision with a car. The European Commission now has competency for vehicle-based injury countermeasures through the Whole Vehicle Type Approval system. As a result, the Commission has recognised that casualty reduction strategies must be based on a full understanding of the real-world need under European conditions and that the effectiveness of vehicle countermeasures must be properly evaluated. The PENDANT study commenced in January 2003 in order to explore the possibility of developing a co-ordinated set of targeted, in-depth crash data resources to support European Union vehicle and road safety policy. Three main work activity areas (Work Packages) commenced to provide these resources. This paper describes some of the outcomes of Work Package 2 (WP2, In-depth Crash Investigations and Data Analysis). In WP2, some 1,100 investigations of crashes involving injured car occupants were conducted in eight EU countries to a common protocol based on that developed in the STAIRS programme. This paper describes the purposes, methodology and results of WP2. It is expected that the results will be used as a co-ordinated system to inform European vehicle safety policy in a systematic, integrated manner. Furthermore, the results of the data analyses will be exploited further to provide new directions to develop injury countermeasures and regulations.
Automotive Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and TechnologyrnAbstract: The degrees of injury severity, as a rule injuries scaled by AIS of specific regions of the human body, investigated out of road traffic accidents correspond to the body-specific loading values, which are found out with the aid of experimental or mathematical simulation of crash tests with motor vehicles or with sled tests. The coherence between the injured human being on the one hand and the physical and the theoretical model respectively on the other hand is established by the risk function, which describes the probability of degrees of injury severity in dependence on the protection criteria. Due to the different physical characteristics in the simulation, e.g. accelerations, forces, compressions and their velocity, the compilation of these quantities, comparable to the MAIS, the maximal occurred single AIS obtained in accident analysis is much more difficult in the simulation than in the accident occurrence. Therefore it is obvious to normalize the loading values gained out of simulation and to summarise them to an entire value in a suitable manner, the safety index.rn
Bicyclists are minimally or unprotected road users. Their vulnerability results in a high injury risk despite their relatively low own speed. However, the actual injury situation of bicyclists has not been investigated very well so far. The purpose of this study was to analyze the actual injury situation of bicyclists in Germany to create a basis for effective preventive measures. Technical and medical data were prospectively collected shortly after the accident at the accident scenes and medical institutions providing care for the injured. Data of injured bicyclists from 1985 to 2003 were analyzed for the following parameters: collision opponent, collision type, collision speed (km/h), Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS), Maximum AIS (MAIS), incidence of polytrauma (Injury Severity Score >16), incidence of death (death before end of first hospital stay). 4,264 injured bicyclists were included. 55% were male and 45% female. The age was grouped to preschool age in 0.9%, 6 to 12 years in 10.8%, 13 to 17 years in 10.4%, 18 to 64 years in 64.7%, and over 64 years in 13.2%. The MAIS was 1 in 78.8%, 2 in 17.0%, 3 in 3.0%, 4 in 0.6%, 5 in 0.4%, and 6 in 0.2%. The incidence of polytrauma was 0.9%, and the incidence of death was 0.5%. The incidence of injuries to different body regions was as follows: head, 47.8%; neck, 5.2%, thorax, 21%; upper extremities, 46.3%; abdomen, 5.8%; pelvis, 11.5%, lower extremities, 62.1%. The accident location was urban in 95.2%, and rural in 4.8%. The accidents happened during daylight in 82.4%, during night in 12.2%, and during dawn/dusk in 5.3%. The road situation was as follows: straight, 27.3%; bend, 3.0%; junction, 32.0%; crossing, 26.4%; gate, 5.9%; others, 5.4%. The collision opponents were cars in 65.8%, trucks in 7.2%, bicycles in 7.4%, standing objects in 8.8%, multiple objects in 4.3%, and others in 6.5%. The collision speed was grouped <31 in 77.9%, 31-50 in 4.9%, 51-70 in 3.7%, and >70 in 1.5%. The helmet use rate was 1.5%. 68% of the registered head injuries were located in the effective helmet protection area. In bicyclists, head and extremities are at high risk for injuries. The helmet use rate is unsatisfactorily low. Remarkably, two thirds of the head injuries could have been prevented by helmets. Accidents are concentrated to crossings, junctions and gates. A significant lower mean injury severity was observed in victims using separate bicycle lanes. These results do strongly support the extension or addition of bicycle lanes and their consequent use. However, the lanes are frequently interrupted at crossings and junctions. This emphasizes also the important endangering of bicyclists coming from crossings, junctions and gates, i.e. all situations in which contact of bicyclists to motorized vehicles is possible. Redesigning junctions and bicycle traffic lanes to minimize the possibility of this dangerous contact would be preventive measures. A more consequent helmet use and use and an extension of bicycle paths for a better separation of bicyclists and motorized vehicle would be simple but very effective preventive measures.
In recent years the boundaries between active and passive safety blurred more and more. Passive safety in the traditional term includes all safety aspects to prevent occupants to be injured or at least injury severity should be reduced. Passive Safety starts with the collision (first vehicle contact) and ends with rescue (open vehicle doors). Within this phase the occupant has to be protected by the passenger compartment whereby no intrusion should occur. Active safety on the other side was developed to interact prior to the collision whereby the goal is to prevent accidents. The extensive interaction between active and passive safety led to the terminologies "Primary" and "Secondary" safety whereas the expression Integrated Safety Concept was generated. Within this study the most well documented single vehicle accidents with cars not equipped with ESP were identified from the PENDANT database and reconstructed. Additional cases were found in the database ZEDATU of TU Graz. In comparison each case was simulated with the assumption that the cars were equipped with ESP. The differences regarding accident avoidance or crash severity as well as reduction of injury risk were analysed.
The price of a new car increased almost every year for a long period. In recent years however, the budget available to most people for purchasing a car either did not grow or became even smaller. Therefore it was in the interest of some OEMs to offer economical car models in the so-called "8,000- Euro class". Here an important question arose regarding the safety of these vehicles. There is no question that the very high safety level of cars reached in Europe during the last decades should not be sacrificed as a consequence of smaller budgets. Customers with sense of responsibility have the right to be properly informed about the balance between safety and price so that they can make a deliberate decision when buying either a new or a used car. Against this background, the German magazine "AutoBILD" commissioned DEKRA to conduct fullscale frontal crash tests with a view to publishing the results. These tests have been carried out in accordance with the corresponding Euro NCAP crash test requirements and performance criteria. The tested vehicles were two new Logans produced by the manufacturer Dacia, two used cars of the type VW Golf IV (registration date 2000) and one new VW Fox. This paper describes the safety features of the vehicles and the results of the five crash tests to demonstrate state-of-the-art safety levels and what levels may be expected from vehicles in the "8,000- Euro class". Looking at real-world crashes it is of interest to think about future trends in a more detailed manner. Therefore it will be more and more necessary to supplement the federal statistics with more detailed in-depth information about the consequences of accidents and the safety performance of crashed vehicles.
In recent years special attention has been paid to reducing the number of fatalities resulting from road traffic accidents. The ambitious target to cut in half the number of road users who are killed each year by 2010 compared with the 2001 figures, as set out in the European White Paper "European Transport Policy for 2010: Time to Decide" implies a general approach covering all kinds of road users. Much has been achieved, e.g. in relation to the safety of car passengers and pedestrians but PTW accidents still represent a significant proportion of fatal road accidents. More than 6,000 motorcyclists die annually on European roads which amounts to 16% of the EU-15 road fatalities. The European Commission therefore launched in 2004 a Sub- Project dealing with motorcycle accidents within an Integrated Project called APROSYS (Advanced PROtection SYStems) forming part of the 6th Framework Programme. In a first step, the combined national statistical data collections of Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain were analysed. Amongst other things parameters like accident location, road conditions, road alignment and injury severity have been explored. The main focus of the analysis was on serious and fatal motorcycle accidents and the results showed similar trends in all four countries. From these results 7 accident scenarios were selected for further investigation via such in-depth databases as the DEKRA database, the GIDAS 2002 database, the COST 327 database and the Dutch element of the MAIDS database. Three tasks, namely the study of PTW collisions with passenger cars, PTW accidents involving road infrastructure features, and motorcyclist protective devices have been assessed and these will concentrate inter alia on accident causes, rider kinematics and injury patterns. A detailed literature review together with the findings of the in-depths database analysis is presented in the paper. Conclusions are drawn and the further stages of the project are highlighted.
Since the compulsory use of child restraints for children up to 5 years of age was introduced in 2000, restraint use among younger children has increased significantly. However, the observed rate of child restraint use plateaus at around 50%, and apparently little spillover effect has been found for older children who are not covered by the law. This report examines the restraint use patterns for children who were injured in cars in relation to driver and child passenger characteristics. Univariate and multivariate analyses were conducted to describe the association between the outcome measure (the proper use of restraints for children) and relevant variables. Better ways for parents and caregivers to improve the use of restraints for children are also discussed.
This paper uses the national accident statistics of Great Britain to evaluate the effectiveness of Electronic Stability Control Systems (ESC) to reduce crash involvement rates. The crash experience of 8,951 cars is analysed and compared to a closely matching set of non-ESC cars using case-control methods. This is one of the largest ESC samples analysed to date. Overall the cars with ESC are involved in 3% fewer crashes although the effectiveness is substantially higher under conditions of adverse road friction. ESC equipped cars are involved in 15% fewer fatal crashes although this reduction represents the combined effect of ESC and passive safety improvements.
This study aimed to identify the occurrence, type and mechanisms of the traumatic injuries of the vulnerable road users in vehicle collisions, and to determine the effects of human, engineering, and environment factors on traffic accidents and injuries. The pedestrian accident cases were collected in the years 2000 to 2005 from Changsha Wujing hospital China and Accident Research Unit at Medical University Hannover in Germany. A statistic analysis was carried out using the collected accident data. The results from analysis of Changsha data were compared with results from analysis of GIDAS data Hannover. The injury severities were determined using AIS code and ISS values. The results were presented in terms of cause of injuries, injury distributions, injury patterns, injury severity. The factors influenced the injury outcomes were proposed and discussed for the vehicle transport environment and road users. The results were discussed with regard to accident data collection, accident sampling and injury distributions etc. In the urban area of Changsha, motorcycles and passenger cars are most frequently involved in vehicle pedestrian accidents. Head and lower extremities injuries are the predominant types of pedestrian injuries. The pedestrian accidents were identified as vital issue in urban traffic safety and therefore a high priority should be given to this road user group in research of safe urban transportation. In Hannover area, cars are most frequently involved in traffic accidents, injured pedestrians are involved in road traffic of Germany in 13% of all causalities only in 2005 and have nearly the same number as motorcyclists, but the half of bicyclists.
Description of road traffic related knee injuries in published investigations is very heterogeneous. The purpose of this study was to estimate the risk of knee injuries in real world car impacts in Germany focusing vulnerable road users (pedestrians, bicyclists and motorcyclists) and restrained car drivers. The accident research unit analyses technical and medical data collected shortly after the accident at scene. Two different periods (years 1985-1993 and 1995-2003) were compared focusing on knee injuries (Abbreviated Injury Scale (AISKnee) 2/3). In order to determine the influences type of collision, direction and speed as well as the injury pattern and different injury scores (AIS, MAIS, ISS) were examined. 1.794 pedestrians, 742 motorcyclists, 2.728 bicyclists and 1.116 car drivers were extracted. 2% had serious ligamentous or bony injuries in relation to all injured. The risk of injury is higher for twowheelers than for pedestrians, but knee injury severity is higher for the latter group. Overall the current knee injury risk is low and significant reduced comparing both time periods (27%, p<0,0001). Severe injuries (AISKnee 2/3) were below 1%). Improved aerodynamic design of car fronts reduced the risk for severe knee injuries significantly (p=0,0015). Highest risk of injury is for motorcycle followed by pedestrians, respectively. Knee protectors could prevent injuries by reducing local forces. The classically described dashboard injury was rarely identified. The overall injury risk for knee injuries in road traffic is lower than estimated and reduced comparing both periods. The aerodynamic shape of current cars compared to older types reduced the incidence and severity of knee injuries. Further modification and optimization of the interior and exterior design could be a proper measurement. Classic described injury mechanisms were rarely identified. It seems that the AIS is still underestimating extremity injuries and their long term results.
This study updates previous IIHS studies comparing estimated delta Vs for crash tested vehicles to the distribution of estimated delta Vs in the National Automotive Sampling System (NASS) Crashworthiness Data System (CDS). The delta V estimates for 232 frontal crash tests at 64.4km/h into a deformable barrier with 40 percent overlap are compared with estimates from frontal offset crashes in the 1997-2004 NASS database. All delta V estimates were based on SMASH, the delta V estimating program used by NASS since 1997. Results indicated that for all vehicles tested by IIHS, SMASH delta Vs were, on average, 32 percent lower than impact speeds and about 28 percent lower than the expected delta V. Almost 80 percent of all real-world frontal crashes resulting in AIS 3+ injuries and just over 60 percent of all fatal crashes occur at or below the average estimated delta V calculated for crash tested vehicles.
This study examines the severity and types of injuries sustained by child pedestrians aged 18 years and below in order to identify the body regions at greatest risk for injury in a pedestrian accident. Detailed medical diagnoses were reviewed retrospectively for 572 child pedestrians admitted to an urban pediatric trauma center with injuries during the time period from January 2001 to December 2005. Eighty percent of these children sustained AIS 2 or greater injuries, most commonly to the lower extremity (41%) and head (34%). Fortyfour percent of admitted children had more significant AIS 3 or greater injuries primarily to the head (58%), thorax (17%) and lower extremities (14%). Testing procedures to assess the child- interaction with the motor vehicle should include injury assessment for the pediatric head, thorax and lower extremities. This understanding of how child pedestrians interact with motor vehicles may provide insight into effective countermeasures with potential for implementation in vehicle designs world-wide.
Since its beginning in 1999, the German In-Depth Accident Study (GIDAS) evolved into the presumably leading representative road traffic accident investigation in Europe, based on the work started in Hanover in 1973. The detailed and comprehensive description of traffic accidents forms an essential basis for vehicle safety research. Due to the ongoing extension of demands of researchers, there is a continuous progress in the techniques and systematic of accident investigation within GIDAS. This paper presents some of the most important developments over the last years. Primary vehicle safety systems are expected to have a significant and increasing influence on reducing accidents. GIDAS therefore began to include and collect active safety parameters as new variables from the year 2005 onwards. This will facilitate to assess the impact of present and future active safety measures. A new system to analyse causation factors of traffic accidents, called ACASS, was implemented in GIDAS in the year 2008. The whole process of data handling was optimised. Since 2005 the on-scene data acquisition is completely conducted with mobile tablet PCs. Comprehensive plausibility checks assure a high data quality. Multi-language codebooks are automatically generated from the database structure itself and interfaces ensure the connection to various database management systems. Members of the consortium can download database and codebook, and synchronize half a terabyte of photographic documentation through a secured online access. With the introduction of the AIS 2005 in the year 2006, some medical categorizations have been revised. To ensure the correct assignment of AIS codes to specific injuries an application based on a diagnostic dictionary was developed. Furthermore a coding tool for the AO classification was introduced. All these enhancements enable GIDAS to be up to date for future research questions.
Who doesn't wear seat belts?
(2009)
Using real world accident data, seat belts were estimated to be 61% effective at preventing fatalities, and 32% effective at preventing serious injuries. They were most effective for drivers with an airbag. Seat belts were estimated as having prevented 57,000 fatalities and 213,000 seriously injured casualties in the UK since 1983. Seat belt legislation was estimated to have prevented 31,000 fatalities and 118,000 seriously injured casualties. A future increase in effective seat belt wearing rate (which takes into account seating position) in the UK from 92.5% to 93% may prevent casualties valued at a societal cost of over -£18 million per year. To target a seat belt campaign, the question "who doesn"t wear seat belts?" must be answered. Seat belt wearing rates and the number of unbelted casualties were analysed. It was primarily young adult males who didn"t wear seat belts, and they made up the majority of unbelted fatalities and seriously injured casualties.
The aim of this study is to investigate the differences in car occupant injury severity recorded in AIS 2005 compared to AIS 1990 and to outline the likely effects on future data analysis findings. Occupant injury data in the UK Cooperative Crash Injury Study Database (CCIS) were coded for the period February 2006 to November 2007 using both AIS 1990 and AIS 2005. Data for 1,994 occupants with over 6000 coded injuries were reviewed at the AIS and MAIS level of severities and body regions to determine changes between the two coding methodologies. Overall there was an apparent general trend for fewer injuries to be coded at the AIS 4+ severity and more injuries to be coded at the AIS 2 severity. When these injury trends were reviewed in more detail it was found that the body regions which contributed the most to these changes in severity were the head, thorax and extremities. This is one of the first studies to examine the implications for large databases when changing to an updated method for coding injuries.
The national accident statistics demonstrate that the situation of passenger car side impacts is dominated by car to car accidents. Car side to pole impacts are relatively infrequent events. However the importance of car side to pole impacts is significantly increasing with fatal and seriously injured occupants. For the present study the German in-depth database GIDAS (German In-Depth-Accident Study) and the UK based database CCIS (Co-operative Crash Injury Study) were used. Two approaches were undertaken to better understand the scenario of car to pole impacts. The first part is a statistical analysis of passenger car side to pole impacts to describe the characteristics and their importance relevant to other types of impact and to get further knowledge about the main factors influencing the accident outcome. The second part contains a case by case review on passenger cars first registered 1998 onwards to further investigate this type of impact including regression analysis to assess the relationship between injury severity and pole impact relevant factors.
The following paper presents the nature and mechanism of injuries sustained in frontal impacts, focusing on car to car impacts. It was found that the body regions most frequently sustaining severe to fatal injuries were the legs and the thorax. The nature and mechanism of the injury sustained was investigated only for the thorax injuries, due to their potentially life threatening nature. The analysis revealed that the most frequent cause of the injury recorded was the seatbelt for low severity injuries and the front structure of the vehicle for higher severity injuries. An analysis of the effect of load limiter technology in the restraint system showed that the proportion of occupants who sustained "no thorax injury" did not increase when a load limiter was fitted to the restraint system. However, a decrease in the "organ" and "organ and skeletal" injuries was observed in the load limiter sample. Sample size and variation mean that these findings are not conclusive.
One goal of the assessment of the crashworthiness of passenger cars is to characterize the potential of injury outcome to occupants of cars involved in an accident. This can be achieved by the help of an index that puts the number of injured occupants of passenger cars in relation to the number of cars involved in an accident. As a consequence, this index decreases with a lower potential of injury and rises with a higher number of injuries while assuming a fixed number of accidents. Another index is introduced that uses an economical weighting of each injury level. The consequential injury costs are calculated using the average economical costs for lightly, severely and fatally injured persons. The calculation of the safety indices is based on an anonymized sample of accident data provided by the Federal Statistical Office. An index of Mercedes passenger car drivers depending on the year of registration between 1991 and 2006 is compared to the index of drivers of cars of other makes within the same range of registration years.
The purpose of this work is to investigate the association between the injuries in motorcycle accident and the main accident configurations. The data were provided by a multicentric case-control study MAIDS regarding the risk of crash and injuries of motorcyclists. Chi-square test was used to evaluate the relationship between the variables and a logistic regression was performed to evaluate the association of injury severity with some variables supposed to be predictive factors. Lesive patterns characterized by internal haemorrhages are mainly associated with fronto-lateral crashes, above all in urban areas. Lacerations or abrasions, mainly reported in torso and lower extremities, are mostly associated with single crashes or accidents in queue also for crashes occurred to low speed (< 50 km/h). The severity of injuries is highly associated with impact speed, regardless of the crash configuration. Fractures and haemorrhages play an important role in determining the severity of injuries. The upper extremities are the most frequently traumatised anatomic areas.