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Vehicle safety devices, similar to new pharmaceuticals and medical devices, may be associated with injury risks as well as injury benefits. Available analytical methods from the public health, medical and vehicle safety fields are described. A literature review is provided that includes an overview of relevant principles of risk analysis, risk-benefit terminology, fields of application, types of risk-benefit analysis, methods of quantification, assumptions, data needs, treatment of uncertainties, and risk-benefit criteria. Several applicable quantification methods are further described, including Quality Adjusted Life-Years, Disability Adjusted Life-Years, and Normalized Injury-Fatality Costs. Data input sources are described, including accident sampling and analysis, and paired comparison test and simulation methods.

A review, analysis and enumeration are presented of factors relevant to motorcycle airbag feasibility research. This includes: an update of the status of related research in the motorcycle airbag feasibility field; relevant experience and factors from the car airbag field; additional unique factors and considerations for motorcycles; and the potential need to address motorcyclist out-of-position riding; other sizes of riders; motorcycle seating layout variation; resistance to and consequences of unintended deployment on a motorcyclist; neck injury criteria and dummy neck biofidelity; injury risk-benefit considerations; environmental exposure on motorcycles; and discussion of feasibility definition and factors.

A prototype safety analysis system has been developed to assess and forecast vehicle safety that can assist vehicle developers integrate various safety technologies into future production vehicles. The prototype system can be used to assess the actual safety in existing vehicles based on fatal accident and vehicle registration data (e.g., US FARS and Polk data); and to estimate the safety in future vehicles based on the estimated effectiveness of candidate passive and active safety technologies (e.g., Curtain Airbags, CMBS) using a systems model with a representative sample of in-depth accident data (e.g., NASS/CDS). Therefore, the prototype system is a useful tool which can be used to estimate the net overall effectiveness of various candidate safety technologies combined, providing a metric which can be used to help optimize the effectiveness of integrated vehicle safety systems.