Application of disability-adjusted life years to predict the burden of injuries and fatalities due to public exposure to engineering technologies.

Background: As a public safety regulator, the Technical Standards and Safety Authority (TSSA) of Ontario, Canada predicts and measures the burden of injuries and fatalities as its primary means of characterizing the state of public safety and for decision-making purposes through the use of a simulation model. The paper proposes a simulation-based predictive model and the use of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) as a population health metric for the purposes of reporting, benchmarking, public safety decision-making, and organizational goal setting. The proposed approach could be viewed as advancement in the application of traditional population health metrics, used primarily for public health policy decisions, for the measurement and prediction of safety risks across a wide variety of engineering technologies to which the general public is exposed.