Current Business Research Project Paper RES 341 July 29, 2010 David Ferguson

Canoeing as a sport can be dangerous causing injury. The research conducted in this article defines a set of hardware and safety systems coupled with environmental and other tangible objects to determine the risk cost within the sport. The information complied would aid the insurance industry in determining insurance premiums for events. The model developed was tested at the International Canoe Slalom Championship in Central Taiwan.

The data collection in this research did not factor injuries caused by human factors. First the injuries were separated into two factors internal and external. An example of an internal injury may be a shoulder injury due to a rowing stroke. An external injury would be an injury caused by hardware. The data used were categorized into hardware sets, safety systems and tangible objects.
The model had four steps, the combination of hardware and human support, the racing program with a code system used based on personal data, extra costs evaluation per venue and decision making. Each tier would have a hiarchical level of risk from high to low and each would have its own critieria to determine the risk with in each area. An example of this would be the matrix shown in figure 1. The end result based on all the statistical data would be that each accident would cost the event an additional 223.77 per accident.

Facilities\outfits | Slight | Medium | Serious | Total | Slight | 199.46 | 13.48 | 0 | 212.94 | Medium | 10.79 | 0.04 | 0 | 10.83 | Serious | 0 | 0 | 0 | Total | 210.25 | 13.52 | 223.77 | 223.77 | Figure 1 Except the canoe racer themselves injuries could result due to hardware. Insurance policy may be utilized to separate between the racers and the hardware. The research not only defined the extra cost for injures from the hardware, it also developed the safety system for injures from the hardware. Two items, weather and course, and three items equipment and facility and outfit, of environment and tangible object were given, respectively. Because the condition of environment and the equipment of tangible object are easily controlled, so the safety system was constructed by the facility and outfit of tangible object. After the extra costs was defined injures of racers from hardware, the Bayes' theorem was introduced to find the probability of risk when slight injury or medium injury or serious injury happen in the accidence. This research is a good example of how statistics are used as a model to affect improvements in a sport.

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