Traffic crash reports (TCRs) are the forms completed by police officers at the scene of all road crashes, including non-injury cases. They record the details of when, how and why the crash happened. They provide essential information to many group of professionals in the road safety and road construction fields: (a) police officers and police intelligence analysts (b) road controlling authority engineers and safety planners (c) traffic engineers and consultants (d) researchers (e) central government, etc." The reports are used, among other things, to mitigate accidents of similar nature and to build a safer travel environment.

Currently, TCRs are paper forms. Manual entries on paper forms have several drawbacks including entry errors and illegibility. To analyse the data collected through paper forms, the data need to be re-entered into an electronic format. Data consistency checks are not possible in manual data entry: for instance, a single response to a single response question cannot be enforced.

The project turns up to solve these problems with the goal of developing a mobile application as a replacement to the paper form. Such electronic data collection, while reducing some of the issues seen with paper-based data collection, gives many other advantages: there is no need for dual data entry; some of the information can be auto-filled (e.g. time and location); some data can be auto-captured (e.g. driver information from the bar-code of the driving license); some media can be attached (e.g. photos, sketches, and audio). The data so collected can be transferred easily to the processing centre. This transfer can be in a manner that lends itself to easy processing (e.g. there may not be a need to re-code the data).

Development of the mobile application will be based on Android platform. The final outcome shoule be able to solve most of the issues described above so that efficiency of recording procedure and data consistency can be improved.

Tool

Eclipse IDE with Android SDK and Android Development Tools plugin