AIIMS Will Develop Light Weight Helmets Suitable for Indian Weather Conditions

AIIMS, in collaboration with the Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia, is planning to develop low cost, light weight helmets that will be easy to wear and will hopefully reduce the number of deaths caused due to road accidents in India.

AIIMS Will Develop Light Weight Helmets Suitable for Indian Weather Conditions

AIIMS, in collaboration with the Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia, is planning to develop low cost, light weight helmets that will be easy to wear and will hopefully reduce the number of deaths caused due to road accidents in India. 

About 377 people die on Indian roads every day, according to “Road Accidents in India 2013”, a Ministry of Road Transport and Highways report. With a view to reducing this statistic, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi, is collaborating with the Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia to work towards developing a helmet that can potentially save many lives.

According to AIIMs, 27 percent of road accident deaths occur because the riders and pillion riders don’t wear helmets. But humid weather conditions and the heavy weight of the helmets are the two reasons why people avoid wearing them.

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Picture for representation only. Photo Credit: Steve Way/Flickr

The two institutions are coming together to develop low-cost, light, and environment friendly helmets with better ventilation that would be well suited for the Indian weather.

“We are trying to develop helmets which are light and airy so that people do not feel uncomfortable putting them on. Since India’s climate is mostly hot and humid for almost nine months of the year, people find wearing helmets uncomfortable,” said AIIMS director, Dr. M C Misra.

Dr. Misra made the announcement about the collaboration at the inauguration of the Eastern Asian Round Table on Trauma Care and Nursing, organised by the union health and foreign ministries in New Delhi. Delegations from 18 countries, including China, Indonesia, Japan, and Malaysia, participated in the roundtable on road safety.

AIIMS is also collaborating with Monash University, Melbourne, to conduct a long term research project in trauma systems. This is a part of the ‘Australia India Trauma Systems’ collaboration project, under which AIIMS will develop a national trauma registry system for India.

“The aim is to develop a national registry so that we can have good robust trauma data composed of uniform data elements that describe the injury event, demographics, pre-hospital information, diagnosis, care and outcomes of injured patients. Although we have an institutional registry, we want other small hospitals to also collect data and provide us so that a national policy could be formulated by analysing it,” AIIMS spokesperson, Amit Gupta, told PTI.

Additionally, AIIMs is planning to develop a trauma rehabilitation program to help patients who are unable to come back for consultations after the accident.

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