Technological approach

Abstract

Injuries result from exposure to energy that exceeds the body's ability to manage or dissipate it. As a key element in a comprehensive injury prevention strategy, technology-focused engineering design can minimize exposure to high-energy events, reduce the incidence or severity of injury given an event, and improve the long-term outcome given an injury. In order to illustrate the technological approach to injury prevention, this chapter focuses on drivers and their occupants and presents current and emerging technology-based strategies to prevent crashes and minimize the energy transfer during a crash. The successes of current safety engineering are presented here in the context of the Haddon Matrix with a call for a new, more integrated approach in order to achieve the next advances in safety technology. Through the use of sensors, computers, and algorithms, emerging technological strategies work on the scale of milliseconds to minutes and require designers to simultaneously consider the driver/occupant, vehicle, and environment in order to stage a continuous response that manages the precrash, crash, and postcrash scenarios.