ABSTRACT
In Japan, childhood injury prevention is an urgent problem because unintentional injury is the leading cause of death among children, and this trend fails to improve, An injury prevention approach by product modification is especially very important. The risk assessment is one of the most fundamental methods to design
safety products. Howcvcr, the conventional risk assessment has bccn carried out subjectively because product makers have poor data on injuries. This paper proposes a new method of evidence-based risk assessment, and describes text mining of child injury data, probabilistic modeling of child behavior, and probabilistic modeling of child injury as basic methods for realizing the proposed method. Child injury data are collected from medical institutions through an injury surveillance system. Text mining of narrative parts of the injury data helps product designers learn types of potential behaviors related to a product and types of injuries due to the product usc. The results of text mining allow product designers to create injury scenarios which depict injurious incidents from the time of product use to injury occurrence. Probabilistic modeling of child behavior based on behavioral observation data allows product designers to compute the probability of the occurrence of the behavior related to the product. Probabilistic modeling of child injury based on the injury data allows product designers to compute the severity of the injury that results from behavior. The risk of the injurious incident scenario is estimated by the combination of the computed probability of the behavior and the computed severity of the injury. Keywords: Childhood Injury Prevention, Product Design, Risk Assessment, Text Mining, Foreseeing Usage of Product, Bayesian Network, Behavior Modeling, Injury Modeling, Risk Computation
In Japan, unintentional injury is the leading cause of death among children, and the number of unintentional injuries among infants is so large that safety measures are urgently needed (Japan Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, 2008). Fall injuries related to conswner products and home environment are the major injuries among infants (Tsuboi et ai., 2008). In general, three approaches are essential for injury prevention: education, law enforcement, and modification of product and environment. The approach of modi tying product and environment prevents injuries that can be serious even if parents leave their child unsupervised. The approach has become an important approach in injury prevention, benefiting people of all ages, not just children, in the passive protection that it affords (WHO, 2008). The development of the methodology of the approach is demanded.
