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Inadequate situation awareness and response are increasingly recognized as prevalent critical errors that lead to young driver crashes. To identify and assess key indicators of young driver performance (including situation awareness), we previously developed and validated a Simulated Driving Assessment (SDA) in which drivers are safely and reproducibly exposed to a set of common and potentially serious crash scenarios. Many of the standardized safety measures can be calculated in near real-time from simulator variables. Assessment of situation awareness, however, largely relies on time-consuming data reduction and video coding. Therefore, the objective of this research was to develop a near real-time automated method for analyzing general direction and location of driver's gaze in order to assess situation awareness.

Restrained children between the ages of 3 to 15 years in crashes were identified in an on-going crash surveillance system (1998-2002) which links insurance claims data to telephone survey and crash investigation data. The risk of upper extremity injury associated with airbag deployment was estimated and a series of cases was examined using in-depth crash investigation to identify the mechanisms of these injuries. This study found that 3.5% of children who were exposed to a passenger airbag (PAB) received an upper extremity fracture, making them 2.5 times as likely to sustain an upper extremity fracture than children in similar crashes who were not exposed to a PAB. Female children were 2.2 times as likely to receive an isolated upper extremity fracture when exposed to a PAB than male children. The incidence rate, gender difference, and injury mechanism in children all appear to be similar to those of adults.