About this project
This project sought to provide a novel crowdsourced data tool for road traffic injury surveillance to improve emergency medical systems.
Project background
Good trauma system planning needs good Road Traffic Collision data, to run hospitals, ambulance travel time cuts, and to reduce high risk roads. WHO Injury Surveillance and Trauma Care guidelines show the need for good data, particularly when resources are limited. Such data is sparse in developing countries, but the boom in digital technology in developing world cities provides a potential alternative data source to help capacity building, emergency medicine and risk reduction, in line with FIA/UN Decade goals.
Project aims and objectives
This project:
- Collected and aggregated novel digital data sources relating to Road Traffic Collisions eg online media, news, mobile navigation, vehicle telematics;
- Assessed the ability of these sources to identify geolocation, timing and severity of Road Traffic Collisions;
- Compared the accuracy of these sources as Road Traffic Collision surveillance to well-established high quality data from London’s transport, ambulance, health services; and
- Established if these sources can be a surrogate for developing world cities to overcome inadequate infrastructure and improve
Project timescales
The project commenced in January 2018 and completed in February 2024.
Project partners
This project is being delivered by Imperial College London / Imperial College Healthcare Trust and is being funded by the RAC Foundation and the FIA via their Road Safety Grants Programme.
For more information
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Project updates
July 2025
A joint statement was released by Lucy Vickers, Chief Data Officer at the Department for Health and Social Care, Ed Humpherson, Director General at the Office for Statistics Regulation, and Professor Sarah Sharples, Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department for Transport, providing cross-departmental support for data sharing to improve road safety. The statement follows a meeting convened by the RAC Foundation earlier this year to see how recommendations made in a 2024 report by Seema Yalamanchili of Imperial College London could best be implemented. Visit here for further information about the statement.
February 2024
The report Data Linkage in Road Safety – Bridging the divide to support better health outcomes has been published. This report written by study lead Seema Yalamanchili concludes that greater sharing of collision data and medical information about crash victims could lead to a much better understanding of the causes and the costs – human and financial – of death and injury on the country’s roads, and hence improve safety.