Accident; analysis and prevention
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In most countries falls are the most common medically attended childhood injury and the majority of injuries in pre-school children occur at home. Numerous systematic reviews have reviewed evidence of the effectiveness of falls prevention interventions, but this evidence has not been synthesised into an overview, making it difficult for policy makers and practitioners to easily access the evidence. To synthesise all available evidence, we conducted an overview of reviews of home safety interventions targeting childhood falls, extracted data from primary studies included in the reviews and supplemented this with a systematic review of primary studies published subsequent to the reviews. ⋯ Most interventions to prevent childhood falls at home have not been evaluated in terms of their effect on reducing falls. Policy makers and practitioners should promote use of safety gates and furniture covers and restriction of baby walker use. Further research evaluating the effect of interventions to reduce falls and falls-related injuries is urgently required.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Keeping baby safe: a randomized trial of a parent training program for infant and toddler motor vehicle injury prevention.
Motor vehicle crashes are responsible for much death and disability among infants and toddlers. This study evaluated Keeping Baby Safe In and Around the Car, a multimedia DVD designed to improve knowledge about car seat installation among parents of infants and toddlers. The randomized controlled trial was conducted with 195 parents of children aged 0-24 months. ⋯ Results from analyses of covariance models show that posttest scores for the intervention condition were significantly higher than those of the control condition on both knowledge and car seat simulation measures. The results, consistent across outcome measures and regardless of child age, suggest that viewing the Keeping Baby Safe In and Around the Car DVD resulted in significant gains in parents' car seat knowledge and their ability to discriminate the critical elements of correct car seat installation. Dissemination of engaging multimedia DVDs such as this program might reduce motor vehicle crash-related injuries to infants and toddlers.
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New trends in research on traffic accidents include Naturalistic Driving Studies (NDS). NDS are based on large scale data collection of driver, vehicle, and environment information in real world. NDS data sets have proven to be extremely valuable for the analysis of safety critical events such as crashes and near crashes. ⋯ The results presented in this paper show that the state of the art subjective review procedures to identify safety critical events from NDS can benefit from automated objective video processing. In addition, this paper discusses the major challenges in making such video analysis viable for future NDS and new potential applications for NDS video processing. As new NDS such as SHRP2 are now providing the equivalent of five years of one vehicle data each day, the development of new methods, such as the one proposed in this paper, seems necessary to guarantee that these data can actually be analysed.
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This study resulted in a model-averaging methodology that predicts crash injury risk using vehicle, demographic, and morphomic variables and assesses the importance of individual predictors. The effectiveness of this methodology was illustrated through analysis of occupant chest injuries in frontal vehicle crashes. The crash data were obtained from the International Center for Automotive Medicine (ICAM) database for calendar year 1996 to 2012. ⋯ The results showed that morphomic variables are as accurate at predicting injury risk as demographic variables. The results of this study emphasize the importance of including morphomic variables when assessing injury risk. The results also highlight the need for morphomic data in the development of human mathematical models when assessing restraint performance in frontal crashes, since morphomic variables are more "tangible" measurements compared to demographic variables such as age and gender.
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Traffic crash mortality is higher in rural areas, but it is unclear whether this is due to greater injury severity, time delays, or Emergency Medical Services (EMS) deficiencies. ⋯ Rural/urban disparity in crash mortality is mostly independent of time delays and EMS effects. However, survival models with TVC support clinical intuition of a "golden hour" in EMS care, and the importance of timely transport to a hospital.