An amount of about 3.5 million accidents is annually registered on European roads, causing almost 43000 deaths. Survival chances after severe injury are significantly correlated to the time interval to the start of relevant medical care. Morbidity and mortality due to injuries from road crashes contribute considerably to human suffering among victims and their relatives and lead to important socio-economic costs. For this reason, improvements in road safety are a global concern. A common and ambitious objective is to reach a drastic reduction of accidents in the next future. Automotive research in Europe is proceeding according to this objective but, at the moment, a zero rate of road accidents seems still to be a really challenging aim. Therefore, the optimal management of the rescue operations remains crucial to reduce at least the accident consequences. The intent will be to drastically decrease the number of fatal events by the introduction of "safe vehicles". This will be realized following the "global safety" approach, consisting in the improvement and integration of risk prevention and collision avoidance functionalities along with passive safety and traffic management approaches.
Abstract