Accident; analysis and prevention
-
Studies have documented a link between distracted driving and diminished safety; however, an association between distracted driving and traffic congestion has not been investigated in depth. The present study examined the behavior of teens and young adults operating a driving simulator while engaged in various distractions (i.e., cell phone, texting, and undistracted) and driving conditions (i.e., free flow, stable flow, and oversaturation). Seventy five participants 16-25 years of age (split into 2 groups: novice drivers and young adults) drove a STISIM simulator three times, each time with one of three randomly presented distractions. ⋯ In turn, more simulated vehicles passed the participant drivers while they were texting or talking on a cell phone than while undistracted. The results indicate that distracted driving, particularly texting, may lead to reduced safety and traffic flow, thus having a negative impact on traffic operations. No significant differences were detected between age groups, suggesting that all drivers, regardless of age, may drive in a manner that impacts safety and traffic flow negatively when distracted.
-
Research studies typically consider older drivers as a homogenous group and do not report on the influence of gender on driving performance. Prior studies report that females are over-represented in crashes compared to males, caused by errors of yielding, gap acceptance, and speed regulation, all of which are assessed in a comprehensive driving evaluation (CDE). In a sample of 294 community dwelling older drivers, we examined and compared specific and total driving errors of both genders, and determined predictors of gender-specific driving errors and pass/fail outcomes who completed a CDE assessed by a certified driving rehabilitation specialist. ⋯ However, older females were 22% less likely than older males to fail an on-road test. Within group comparisons showed that older males and females >75 years were 3.2 and 3.5 times more likely to fail the on-road test compared to younger males and females (aged between 63 and 75), respectively. Our findings suggest that focusing on older old (75+) and old-old (85+) age groups may be more efficient for future investigations of driving performance.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.