# Development of a secure, standardised and interoperable surveillance platform for race-related injury and illness data within the UCI men’s and women’s road cycling world tour: a study protocol

## TL;DR

This paper outlines a secure system to track injuries in professional road cycling, aiming to improve data quality and support injury prevention.

## Contribution

A novel, secure, and standardized injury surveillance platform for professional road cycling is proposed.

## Key findings

- The system integrates secure data collection with contextual race data to better understand injury mechanisms.
- The platform ensures compliance with data protection regulations like GDPR through pseudonymisation and access controls.
- The system is expected to enhance injury data quality and inform prevention strategies in elite cycling.

## Abstract

Professional road cycling is associated with a high incidence of traumatic injuries. Despite these risks, current injury data-collection methods lack consistency and standardisation, thereby limiting meaningful surveillance and prevention efforts.

To describe the development of a secure, centralised injury surveillance system for elite cycling that enables standardised data collection, contextual integration and long-term injury tracking while ensuring compliance with ethical and data protection standards.

The system integrates an incident-activated Qualtrics-based injury reporting platform (hosted at Queen’s University Belfast) used by team medical staff and accessed via (or) within a secure, access-controlled server infrastructure hosted at IDLab, Ghent University. The database is protected by role-based authentication, encrypted data transmission and application programming interface-based access controls. Race footage and contextual data (eg, weather including ambient temperature, terrain) will be linked to medical reports to improve understanding of injury mechanisms.

The system is designed to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation. Data pseudonymisation, consent protocols and ethics are built into the design. All access is logged, monitored and restricted to authorised users only.

The project is expected to improve the quality and completeness of injury data in professional road cycling, facilitate epidemiological research, inform the development and evaluation of injury prevention strategies and support international policy development.