Zenodo
E-bike injuries among US children surged in 2025: national estimates from emergency department reports, 2019–2025, using machine learning to read injury narratives
Par Subash Kumar.
Contenu en anglais
Résumé
Background
E-bikes and e-scooters are now common on US streets, but tracking their injuries is hard. In 2024 the US Consumer Product Safety Commission gave e-bikes their own product code; before then, e-bikes shared a code with mopeds. National estimates for 2025, and adjusted comparisons of children's e-bike and bicycle injuries, are lacking.
Methods
I used all injuries in the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, a national sample of US emergency departments, for 2019–2025. I labelled each injury by device from its product codes and written narrative. For unclear records in the old shared code, I trained a text classifier on 2024–2025 records, when e-bikes and mopeds had separate codes. I estimated national visits with survey-based 95% CIs and compared hospitalisation with regular bicycles using weighted logistic regression.