Making smarter, safer bicyclists

Bicycling injuries represent a significant public health problem in the United States. Approximately 600,000 bicycle-related injuries are treated in emergency rooms each year.

Children ages 5 to 15 years old represent a particularly vulnerable segment of the population, having the highest rate of injury per million cycling trips. Motor vehicles are involved in approximately one-third of all bicycle-related brain injuries and in 90 percent of all fatalities resulting from bicycle crashes.

Using a bicycling simulator at the University of Iowa—one of only a few in the world used for such work—a group of researchers in the Departments of Computer Science and Psychology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences focus on factors that may put children at risk for car-bicycle collisions when crossing roads. The simulator, housed in the Hank Virtual Environments Lab, uses virtual environment technology to study the decision-making processes of children and how they cross traffic-filled roads.

To learn more about the UI bicycling simulator, visit homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~hank/research/page1.html.