Audi plans partnership with international association of surgeons

To gather valuable information for the development of safety systems, the Accident Research Unit (AARU) of Audi is planning to establish a partnership in the area of medical accident analysis with the AO Foundation, a global association of orthopedic surgeons. This international association is specialized in the operative treatment of bone fractures and other bone injuries with implants.

One of the tasks performed by AARU is the conduction of joint case reviews, with the methodical discussion of every detail on an accident, from the cause, to the course of events, to the consequences. The results are then entered in encoded and anonymized form into the AARU database, making the results of the investigation available for additional evaluations, statistics, analyses and special queries.

According to Dr. Miklos Kiss, a coordinator at the Audi Accident Research Unit, thanks to the support of the AO Foundation, Audi would gain “access to valuable international research opportunities in partnership with specialists from the field of orthopedic surgery.”

Over the last 12 years the Audi Accident Research Unit has been researching accidents, focusing not only on the technical side, but also on the medical and psychological aspects, thanks to an interdisciplinary team of experts.

The AARU is the result of a research partnership between Regensburg University Hospital, the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior and Audi. Audi has gathered a team of experts that investigates traffic accidents in order to understand the course of events surrounding the accident, to enhance general traffic safety and to use the data gathered on the development of assistance systems for new Audi models.

The AARU work process of analyzing an accident starts with a team of engineers that reconstruct an accident and documents the damage to the vehicle. The analysis also involves taking more than 400 photographs per vehicle and making almost 1,300 technical entries in the database.

The accident is also analyzed in terms of its medical aspects. A team of doctors is responsible for monitoring the injury patterns and healing processes. A case can take several months until it is closed depending on the severity of the injuries and the healing process. Doctors prepare an overview with all of the injuries for each accident victim, with injuries being classified according to severity and possible long-term consequences.

Finally, there is also a psychological intervention, where a team of psychologists interviews all of the persons involved in the accident in order to understand what these people experienced subjectively, how they perceived the situation and what strategies they employed to avoid the accident.