An IT appliance for remote collaborative review of mechanisms of injury to children in motor vehicle crashes

This paper describes the architecture and implementation of a Java-based appliance for collaborative review of crashes involving injured children in order to determine mechanisms of injury. The multidisciplinary expertise needed for such reviews is not available at any one institution, resulting in the need for remote collaboration, while the sensitive nature of the information requires secure transmission and controlled access of data. The intended users of the appliance are researchers, engineers, medical doctors, government regulators, automobile and restraint manufacturers, insurance company representatives, and others who are interested in understanding the types and causes of injuries to children involved in motor vehicle crashes. The ultimate goal is to devise engineering solutions that prevent similar injuries from occurring in the future. The collaboration appliance (called Telecenter) enables the following activities: (1) the distributed asynchronous collection of digital content needed for each crash case review under a scheme that consistently organizes content across multiple cases; (2) the secure, Web-based remote participation of users in case-review meetings that involve viewing of case-specific content, live communication (written or verbal), multimedia access and sharing (slide presentations/ images), and use of Web resources; and (3) archival and post-review access of case reviews for follow-up activities and other functions (e.g., statistics, search, and networking). The Telecenter design supports audio conferencing, remote delivery and viewing of slide presentations, and other collaboration features also available in commercial and public-domain collaboration middleware products. However, it goes beyond existing solutions by also embedding a specific workflow and content organization suited for traffic injury reviews, supporting spatio-temporal role-based access control, distributed management of content and seamless integration of existing services. The current status and experience from using an early prototype of the Telecenter in actual case reviews are discussed, along with planned extensions to its functionality.