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CChIPS Annual Reports
Read about our Partnering for Safety: Download the 2019 CChIPS Annual Report Download the...
CChIPS Celebrates 10 Years - Report
In 2015, CChIPS celebrated a decade of convening industry members, academia, and government to...
CChIPS Celebrates 10 Years - Timeline
Since its inception in 2005, CChIPS has provided a novel mechanism for researchers to work in...
Treating Children as Children
The Center for Child Injury Prevention Studies (CChIPS) at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) is a National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center that focuses exclusively on making children and adolescents safer. Of the more than 80 I/UCRC designated centers nationwide, CChIPS is the only one that focuses solely on child injury prevention.
Through CChIPS, researchers from CHOP, the University of Pennsylvania, and The Ohio State University work side by side with industry members to conduct translational research that is practical to industry. Scientific advances made by CChIPS investigators provide commercial opportunities for the Center’s industry members. This synergistic collaboration is ideal for generating ideas for new research projects and sharing expertise and resources.
CChIPS Mission
The CChIPS mission is to advance the safety of children, youth, and young adults (through age 24) by facilitating scientific inquiry into childhood and young adult injuries and to translate these findings into commercial applications and public education programs for preventing future injuries.
The fundamental idea behind CChIPS' work is that children are not small adults (mechanically, psychologically, developmentally, and socially). Therefore, child injury deserves to be examined and understood as a distinct branch of science. As automotive design and our understanding of consumer behavior become increasingly complex, enhanced research, product development, and educational efforts are necessary to further child safety. Over the past 10 years CChIPS has conducted more than 100 projects with researchers partnering with leading automotive manufacturers, restraint suppliers, insurance providers, and government agencies to translate their findings into tangible innovations in safety technology and public education programs.
The CChIPS research method applies the broad and diverse backgrounds of its investigators to create and implement novel integrated approaches. For example, child crash injury-related research uses Biomechanical Epidemiology, an approach developed by CChIPS investigators, whereby engineering questions are answered with the rigorous methods used for clinical research studies. Currently, the majority of CChIPS research is focused on preventing road traffic injuries and deaths.
Areas of Research
The scope of CChIPS research projects include:
- injury biomechanics, mechanisms, and tolerance
- technological solutions (design, development, and testing)
- how humans interact with and behave in relation to safety technology
- safety promotion and education
- the evaluation of safety devices and behavior modification programs
