Data Analysis
Data analysis is certain to be the defining topic of the next few years in the accident reconstruction industry. Nowadays, data is permanently recorded and stored in a wide variety of devices. It would therefore be fundamentally wrong to close oneself off to this additional method of information. On the contrary: one can assume that the work of the accident analyst will move away from classical mechanics and more and more towards in-depth data analysis over time. Every mobile phone, every car, every sports watch permanently tracks our movement patterns and it is precisely this information that can contain important clues about an accident. AnalyzerPro has numerous interfaces to commonly available data formats, such as GPS data or data from common measuring devices.
Video recordings have become an indispensable part of everyday life. This makes it all the more important to process this source of information for accident analysis. AnalyzerPro has currently taken the first step in this direction with a tool that can automatically recognise moving objects in videos and determine their speeds. In this way, data from static surveillance cameras can be transferred directly into an accident analysis calculation. Since video recordings are often made with a wide-angle lens, a method of video equalisation is integrated to increase accuracy. The data is shown in the form of the red line in the diagram. The blue line interpolates this data to a round driving behaviour.
It is well known that vehicles constantly measure driving data. With its “Bosch CDR” tool (CDR = Crash Data Retrieval), Bosch plays a market-leading role in reading out this data. In the event of an accident, the Bosch CDR accesses the so-called EDR (Event Data Recorder). This EDR is filled by various sensors in the vehicle, for example the airbag sensor. In the event of a trigger event, the sensors fill a memory that ideally stores five seconds of pre-collision driving behaviour as well as deceleration behaviour during the collision. The Bosch CDR tool then retrieves this data. AnalyzerPro can read out the pre-collision behaviour found in the memory from a maximum of six trigger events and make it available to the expert for direct further processing.
An important aspect of data analysis are the digital tachographs, which store their data in so-called DDD files. The recording devices write down speeds in 1 hertz or even 4 hertz format. This accuracy makes it possible to establish correlations between time and current driving behaviour, but also to make a relatively accurate estimate of pre-collision driving speeds. AnalyzerPro can read and process all these data, even from the latest generation of recording devices.
With the trend towards sports and cycling computers, this new aspect also appears in accident analysis. The FIT or GPX format, which is used by many sports watch manufacturers to record data, should be mentioned here in particular. Although these data sets are extremely imprecise in their resolution, they often offer several different comparative values from which conclusions can be drawn.
