BACKGROUND The injury spectrum published in the literature has mainly been presented for a certain age group, as elderly or for a certain type of injury, as fracture and often restricted to in-hospital care cases. Our objective was to give an overview of the major types of injuries for all age groups and trends in the adult population. METHODS We analyzed 68,159 adult injury events, which occ...

The current head Injury Assessment Reference Values (IARVs) for the child dummies are based in part on scaling adult and animal data and on reconstructions of real world accident scenarios. Reconstruction of well-documented accident scenarios provides critical data in the evaluation of proposed IARV values, but relatively few accidents are sufficiently documented to allow for accurate reconstru...

This paper proposes an integrative model of fall motion detection and fall severity level estimation. For the fall motion detection, a continuous stream of data representing time sequential frames of fifteen body joint positions was obtained from Kinect’s 3D depth camera. A set of features is then extracted and fed into the designated machine learning model. Compared with existing models that r...

INTRODUCTION Falls are the leading cause of unintentional injuries in the U.S.; however, national estimates for all community-dwelling adults are lacking. This study estimated the national incidence of falls and fall-related injuries among community-dwelling U.S. adults by age and gender and the trends in fall-related injuries across the adult life span. METHODS Nationally representative data...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Stroke survivors are at high risk for falling. Identifying physical, clinical, and social factors that predispose stroke patients to falls may reduce further disability and life-threatening complications, and improve overall quality of life. METHODS We used 5 biennial waves (1998-2006) from the Health and Retirement Study to assess risk factors associated with falling a...

The frequent occurrence of fire in most forested areas of California and southwestern Oregon before this century has been well established. Likewise, the importance of dead woody material to various wildlife species as snags and downed logs has been well documented. It is unlikely that much large woody material survived fire long enough to decompose fully in fire regimes that preceded the fire-...