In order to prevent hip fractures 548 fall-prone senior citizens living in 20 nursing homes participated in a randomized controlled trial of hip protectors. One hundred and sixty-four were randomly selected into the control group and 384 into the intervention group. Of the patients in the intervention group 138 (35.9%) wore the protector throughout the whole 10 months of the study's duration, 124 (32.3%) quit wearing the protectors after an initial wearing period and 122 (31.8%) refused to wear them at all. The regular wearers had the protector on during an average of roughly 12 hours a day, so they were protected for 50% of their exposure time (including at night). Fifty-nine percent of the drop-outs stopped wearing the protectors in the first two study months, mostly for non-medical reasons. Calculation by a forecasting model showed that those senior citizens who were initially prepared to wear the protector tended to be those who were physically restricted.

Some 245,000 sporting accidents occur yearly in Switzerland. The social accident costs amount to approximately 1.8 billion francs per year. Every second sporting accident occurs during a ball game. For the shown sporting activities, distortion is the most common type of injury among adults and contained fractures are most common in children. As is to be expected, the number of accidents has grown along with the exploding popularity of snowboarding and in-line skating. These new sporting activities show no unknown injury patterns which would demand new treatment methods.

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