Interactive dashboard helps identify agricultural injury patterns and risks

Agriculture is one of the most dangerous occupations in the United States. Each year, vehicles, machinery, environmental hazards, and other incidents cause thousands of injuries and hundreds of fatalities. A thorough understanding of the main risks is key to preventing accidents and promoting agricultural safety.

A research team at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has developed an interactive platform that allows users to obtain customized information about agricultural injuries. The researchers describe their work in a new article.

The Agricultural Injury Dashboard covers ag injuries in five Midwestern states. It contains tracks for researchers and educators to customize their queries according to specific purposes. The dashboard allows users to search on a variety of parameters and provides the information as interactive graphs and charts.

The researchers first conducted a review of existing sources where users can look up ag injury information and found they weren't very user-friendly. They set out to develop a tool that was functional, efficient, and easy to use.

The dataset provides information such as cause and type of injury, location, time, and victim demographics. The data also includes codes for the Occupational Injury and Illness Classification System (OIICS) and the Farm and Agricultural Injury Classification (FAIC).

Li and Issa developed the interactive dashboard using Microsoft Power BI, which provides a range of visualization capabilities. They pilot tested it with different user groups, further refining the tools based on the feedback.

While the dashboard was developed in a partnership with AgInjuryNews, future updates will be populated by the researchers' own data.

While this means the dashboard will be primarily focused on Illinois, Issa said it will be easy for users from other states to adapt it to their purposes by adding their own datasets.

"Accidents, especially fatal ones, happen rarely enough that you may not notice a pattern in your own community. Therefore, it's important to stay abreast about what's going on in the wider region. If you see trends of incidents occurring across communities, you can launch various programs to educate farmers and address these issues before they grow bigger," Issa said.

Eventually, the researchers hope to expand the dashboard to capture not just the occurrence of accidents, but also their monetary and human impact on communities.

Source:

College of ACES at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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