Abstract
During the last decade, the European Commission and the EU Member States have been very active in promoting measures to improve road safety. Most of the measures supported focused on accident prevention, through better driver education and training, and modifications to the traffic infrastructure and regulations, or by improving the vehicle through passive safety measures, so as to reduce the risk or severity of injury should an accident occur. These actions contributed to the continuous reduction of the number of killed on European roads. Nevertheless, though things have certainly improved in recent years, the number of road accident and the number of road victims is still high in the European Union, with around 41000 fatalities and 1.6 million injuries a year. Unless this pattern changes, roughly one in every 80 European citizens will be killed on the roads and one in three will, at least once in his life, need hospital treatment after an accident. New measures and systems based on information and communication technologies, are bringing new "intelligent" solutions to improve road safety and reduce the number of accidents. The presentation focuses the EU Research Programme for the development of e-safety systems to support the driver and drastically improve road safety. The presentation covers also the Accidentology in Europe, the results of project that have ended, the description of running projects and of the projects that are about to start, an attempt to estimate the impact of these technologies and to conclude, the future activities like the e-safety action plan and the next Framework programme for research (FP6).