Injury coding and assessment is one of the most important fields in injury prevention. Today, injury assessment is mainly addressed to fatality risk, although the main part of the injured survive the trauma leaving research and car design with an incomplete, and sometimes misleading, picture of the traffic safety problem.

By applying a disability scaling approach to injury data, the importance of different assessment methods can be studied. In the present study, frontal collisions with a Volvo model were used to demonstrate how disability scaling with different levels of severity changed the importance of injuries to different body regions. The injuries were also correlated to crash severity.

The study showed, that changing the injury scaling clearly changes the degree of importance of different body regions and crash severity ranges. Injuries to especially the skull/brain, neck, face and chest are sensitive to the injury scaling method and the crash severity studied.