Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ProtAct-Us (ProtAct-Us from long-term consequences of road crashes)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2024-06-01 al 2025-11-30
ProtAct-Us from serious injury and long term consequences of road crashes
Battling serious injuries with long-term consequences in road traffic remains one important issue in the overall goal of resilient future road transport (Vision Zero). Challenges of increasing personal transport in urban areas coupled with autonomous vehicles and shuttles, new mobility devices and the overall need to ensure the safety of vulnerable road users as well as all types of vehicle occupants’ require solid medical background knowledge and innovative engineering approaches. ProtAct-Us project's work serves to protect all Road User Groups from serious injury and long-term physical, cognitive and mental health consequences of road crashes through innovatively interlinked research action between medical and engineering methods.
ProtAct-Us methodology and tools enable the development of efficient, resilient, inclusive, and effective countermeasures for all road user groups affected by road crashes and likely to endure injury in such. Those road user groups are cluster within ProtAct-Us into groups facing similar engineering mitigation challenges and endure a set of typical serious injuries with potential long term consequences.
Comprensive engagement of all road user groups and relevant stakeholders in the scientific engineering community, automotive and transport mobility industry, but also, and that is the crucial aspect of ProtAct-Us, the medical, i.e. public health experts in the form of hospitals, health statisticians are involved to bring combined innovative solutions for these challenges closer to deployment and application, thus reducing in the long term social economic costs and person burdon and suffering.
ProtAct-Us overall objectives:
O1: Inclusive, prevailing, and sustainable protection of all road users through safe and robust countermeasures in and after road crashes, advocating an inclusive safety approach providing equal opportunities, irrelevant of sex, gender, stature, and age.
- Mitigate long-term consequences of physical impairment and Mitigation of long-term mental health disorders
O2: Reduction of societal cost aspects of long-term consequences of injury
- Optimise early treatment response strategies and efficiency of medical treatment
- Identify cost categories and follow up of costs, out of pocket and hospital-isation costs
- Reduce socio-economic harm for victims of road traffic accidents
O3: Medical and engineering tool and method upgrade
- Develop medical and Epidemiological indicators and codification with the fo-cus on long-term consequences allowing for risk assessment
- Upgrades and improvement of HBMs, ATDs and physical tools regarding assessment capability and test procedures of injuries with long term conse-quences
- Definition of procedures for the standardized usage of the developed meth-od and tools
O4: Upgrade and develop New Generation of Protection principles for all road user groups
- Upgrade and improve protection of vehicle occupants
- Development of protection methods for sitting and standing passengers in shuttles and buses
- Upgrade protection equipment for bicycle, motorcycle riders and passen-gers
- Improve protection possibilities for pedestrians in critical road traffic situa-tions
- Develop Post Crash response (early and efficient management of patient needs)
O5: Advocate and leverage evidence-based policies
- Collaborate / Harmonise Policy, Regulatory and Standards requirements
- Foster Policy Makers' upgrades through international cooperation and facili-tate interaction with other EU and world-wide initiatives
The ProtAct-Us consortium consists of 13 international partners and two associated partners are supporting the project in psychological and injury epidemiological, as well as public health realted topics.
follow ProtAct-Us at:
www.protact-us.eu and linked-in https://www.linkedin.com/company/protact-us/(si apre in una nuova finestra)
Battling serious injuries with long-term consequences in road traffic remains one important issue in the overall goal of resilient future road transport (Vision Zero). Challenges of increasing personal transport in urban areas coupled with autonomous vehicles and shuttles, new mobility devices and the overall need to ensure the safety of vulnerable road users as well as all types of vehicle occupants’ require solid medical background knowledge and innovative engineering approaches. ProtAct-Us project's work serves to protect all Road User Groups from serious injury and long-term physical, cognitive and mental health consequences of road crashes through innovatively interlinked research action between medical and engineering methods.
ProtAct-Us methodology and tools enable the development of efficient, resilient, inclusive, and effective countermeasures for all road user groups affected by road crashes and likely to endure injury in such. Those road user groups are cluster within ProtAct-Us into groups facing similar engineering mitigation challenges and endure a set of typical serious injuries with potential long term consequences.
Comprensive engagement of all road user groups and relevant stakeholders in the scientific engineering community, automotive and transport mobility industry, but also, and that is the crucial aspect of ProtAct-Us, the medical, i.e. public health experts in the form of hospitals, health statisticians are involved to bring combined innovative solutions for these challenges closer to deployment and application, thus reducing in the long term social economic costs and person burdon and suffering.
ProtAct-Us overall objectives:
O1: Inclusive, prevailing, and sustainable protection of all road users through safe and robust countermeasures in and after road crashes, advocating an inclusive safety approach providing equal opportunities, irrelevant of sex, gender, stature, and age.
- Mitigate long-term consequences of physical impairment and Mitigation of long-term mental health disorders
O2: Reduction of societal cost aspects of long-term consequences of injury
- Optimise early treatment response strategies and efficiency of medical treatment
- Identify cost categories and follow up of costs, out of pocket and hospital-isation costs
- Reduce socio-economic harm for victims of road traffic accidents
O3: Medical and engineering tool and method upgrade
- Develop medical and Epidemiological indicators and codification with the fo-cus on long-term consequences allowing for risk assessment
- Upgrades and improvement of HBMs, ATDs and physical tools regarding assessment capability and test procedures of injuries with long term conse-quences
- Definition of procedures for the standardized usage of the developed meth-od and tools
O4: Upgrade and develop New Generation of Protection principles for all road user groups
- Upgrade and improve protection of vehicle occupants
- Development of protection methods for sitting and standing passengers in shuttles and buses
- Upgrade protection equipment for bicycle, motorcycle riders and passen-gers
- Improve protection possibilities for pedestrians in critical road traffic situa-tions
- Develop Post Crash response (early and efficient management of patient needs)
O5: Advocate and leverage evidence-based policies
- Collaborate / Harmonise Policy, Regulatory and Standards requirements
- Foster Policy Makers' upgrades through international cooperation and facili-tate interaction with other EU and world-wide initiatives
The ProtAct-Us consortium consists of 13 international partners and two associated partners are supporting the project in psychological and injury epidemiological, as well as public health realted topics.
follow ProtAct-Us at:
www.protact-us.eu and linked-in https://www.linkedin.com/company/protact-us/(si apre in una nuova finestra)
ProtAct-Us currently works in parallel medical tools and methods and on direct engineering soultions and mitigation measures of all road user goups.
On the medical side this envolves toos for robust and reliable medical, epidemiological data correlation, standardization and classification of long-term physical, cognitive and mental health data collection in relation to long term consequences of road crashes.
On the engineering side ProtAct-Us develops assessment tools and methods as well as mitigation solutions for the differnt road user groups and tehir specific needs. those are the two groups of Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs) or more recently called Active Road users like Motorcycles, Bicycles & New Micro-Mobility riders and Pedestrians on the one hand, and two groups of in-vehicle road users: traditional car occupants in front and rear seats incl small children, and bus and shuttle occupants. For this divers population in age, sex and size effective countermeasures are developed mitigating serious injuries and long term consequences.
Relevant technical milestones reached by Nov. 2025:
MS2 Identification of relevant predictors for long-term consequences
MS4 Collaboration established with hospitals and ethics committee approvals and study protocol
MS5 Assessment and benefit evaluation concept available
MS6 Assessment dataset for long-term consequences resulting from trauma (empty database + forms)
MS7 Indicators of relevant injuries with long term consequences identified
MS8 Road user specific Use Cases for countermeasures development defined
MS9 Collaboration Agreement with other (sister) projects
On the medical side this envolves toos for robust and reliable medical, epidemiological data correlation, standardization and classification of long-term physical, cognitive and mental health data collection in relation to long term consequences of road crashes.
On the engineering side ProtAct-Us develops assessment tools and methods as well as mitigation solutions for the differnt road user groups and tehir specific needs. those are the two groups of Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs) or more recently called Active Road users like Motorcycles, Bicycles & New Micro-Mobility riders and Pedestrians on the one hand, and two groups of in-vehicle road users: traditional car occupants in front and rear seats incl small children, and bus and shuttle occupants. For this divers population in age, sex and size effective countermeasures are developed mitigating serious injuries and long term consequences.
Relevant technical milestones reached by Nov. 2025:
MS2 Identification of relevant predictors for long-term consequences
MS4 Collaboration established with hospitals and ethics committee approvals and study protocol
MS5 Assessment and benefit evaluation concept available
MS6 Assessment dataset for long-term consequences resulting from trauma (empty database + forms)
MS7 Indicators of relevant injuries with long term consequences identified
MS8 Road user specific Use Cases for countermeasures development defined
MS9 Collaboration Agreement with other (sister) projects
ProtAct-Us project is currently in progress
Results so far with the main focus of seting the base for the further project work:
# Analysis and Review of Existing Injury Data and availability data on serious injuries and long-term consequences for the road user groups targeted within ProtAct-Us:
- pedestrians
- occupants of passenger transportation systems
- passenger car occupants
- users of personal protective equipment for motorcy-cles, bicycles, and emerging micromobility devices are summarised in deliverable "Initial findings on serious injury and long-term consequences"
# ProtAct-Us Assessment concept for long-term consequences of road crashes are summarised in deliverable "ProtAct-Us concept of injury mitigation, assessment, and benefits"
# Relevant use cases for the various road user categories incl relevant crash scenarios are summarised in deliverable "Description of road-user-related baseline use cases" and focus on the following:
• Pedestrians:
- Head and thorax injuries for adults and children, internal organs, lower extremities
• Occupant Passenger Cars
- Head and thorax injuries for children
- Various injuries in all body regions for adults
• VRUs (Motorcycles, Bicycles, New Mobility Devices)
- Children and adults, Head injuries (skull & facial fractures, brain injuries)
• Occupants of Passenger Transport Systems (Bus, Shuttle)
- Various injuries in all body regions for adults
# Multi-center, harmonized data collection scheme was established to result in a methodology to collect specific information of long-term consequences, with a focus not only on physical injuries but also on the psychological outcome after road crashes.
Results so far with the main focus of seting the base for the further project work:
# Analysis and Review of Existing Injury Data and availability data on serious injuries and long-term consequences for the road user groups targeted within ProtAct-Us:
- pedestrians
- occupants of passenger transportation systems
- passenger car occupants
- users of personal protective equipment for motorcy-cles, bicycles, and emerging micromobility devices are summarised in deliverable "Initial findings on serious injury and long-term consequences"
# ProtAct-Us Assessment concept for long-term consequences of road crashes are summarised in deliverable "ProtAct-Us concept of injury mitigation, assessment, and benefits"
# Relevant use cases for the various road user categories incl relevant crash scenarios are summarised in deliverable "Description of road-user-related baseline use cases" and focus on the following:
• Pedestrians:
- Head and thorax injuries for adults and children, internal organs, lower extremities
• Occupant Passenger Cars
- Head and thorax injuries for children
- Various injuries in all body regions for adults
• VRUs (Motorcycles, Bicycles, New Mobility Devices)
- Children and adults, Head injuries (skull & facial fractures, brain injuries)
• Occupants of Passenger Transport Systems (Bus, Shuttle)
- Various injuries in all body regions for adults
# Multi-center, harmonized data collection scheme was established to result in a methodology to collect specific information of long-term consequences, with a focus not only on physical injuries but also on the psychological outcome after road crashes.