About Us

In 2013-14 we noted that a large proportion of the patients cared for at the CHUK emergency department (ED) had traumatic brain injury (TBI), in severe TBI the mortality was high, and many TBIs were caused by RTI. We began to study these patients, trying to understand if maybe the care they did or did not receive in the ED was contributing to high mortality. This question proved difficult to answer and required many more resources than seemed appropriate to get adequate sample sizes. It was also curious that despite nearly universal helmet use there were still so many TBIs secondary to moto crashes.

We decided to focus instead on understanding the causes and nature of these moto crashes and to investigate the benefits of the helmets commonly used in Rwanda. Rwanda does not presently have a moto helmet standard regulation nor guidelines regarding the replacement of a helmet after a crash. We have seen that many moto users wear the helmet but do not secure the strap, and if the helmet falls off the head in a crash it can’t be effective at preventing injury. Motorcycles themselves are not inspected like cars and other personal vehicles, and perhaps this contributes to a high rate of crashes. Motorcycles make up about 50% of cases. In either case, we know the vehicles on Kigali roads, and so improving the safety of these vehicles has the potential to make a very large impact, reducing death and injury substantially. In 2014 we brought 3 commonly used helmets in Rwanda back to the biomedical engineering lab at Duke University and tested the helmets against an American Department of Transportation(DOT) certified helmet that costs about five times more money to purchase in Kigali than the most affordable and common helmet, the SafetyMet brand that most moto taxis use. The most used Rwandan helmet, SafetyMet, performed as well and sometimes better than the DOT helmet.

Also, in 2014 we interviewed about 600 moto taxi drivers and asked them questions about their driving habits and also about the most dangerous spots for them to drive around Kigali, where are they worried, they will get in a crash? We mapped the locations then compared these to locations identified from Rwandan National Police (RNP) crash reports from Kigali filed in 2013. The locations matched well, and we learned that the technique of interviewing high road utilizers was an effective way to identify crash hotspots, as many LMICs are not as fortunate at Rwanda to have accurate data within the police records.

In the past 6 month we have formed a strong, interdisciplinary collaboration of investigators including Rwandan government officials, medical doctors, local non-governmental organizations (NGOs), engineers, geographic information systems (GIS), and public health experts.

Professionals, students, and academics from the University of Rwanda, Makarere University, Jefferson University, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Duke University. We are partnered with engineering and motorcycle crash reconstruction experts from private consulting firms who conducted similar studies in Thailand, Europe, and the USA.