The objective of the smart helmet is to provide a means and apparatus for detecting and reporting accidents. Sensors, Wi-Fi enabled processor, and cloud computing infrastructures are utilised for building the system. The accident detection system communicates the accelerometer values to the processor which continuously monitors for erratic variations. When an accident occurs, the related details are sent to the emergency contacts by utilizing a cloud based service. The vehicle location is obtained by making use of the global positioning system. The system promises a reliable and quick delivery of information relating to the accident in real time and is appropriately named Konnect. Thus, by making use of the ubiquitous connectivity which is a salient feature for the smart cities, a smart helmet for accident detection is built.
The Konnect provides a cheap, effective accident detection and notification system to address the aforementioned problems. Though integrating sensors with a high-end microcontroller provides rapid accident detection, they are limited in terms of processing and notification capabilities. The TI CC3200 is a Wi-Fi enabled controller, which is used to connect to a data network for accessing cloud services. This expands the computational and storage capabilities of the system. The system on the helmet communicates with the cloud based incidence response and notification system via a RESTful architecture over HTTP using JSON
ACCIDENT DETECTION SYSTEM
A tri-axial accelerometer, GPS, and microcontroller are present on the helmet. The on-board accelerometer BMA222 in the CC3200 detects variation in spatial components along 3 orthogonal directions x, y and z. A threshold value is predefined giving allowances for minor levels of head tilt not pertaining to an accident. When a sudden change exceeding the threshold value in all 3 directions is observed simultaneously, the change in resultant acceleration is calculated. Average variation of resultant acceleration values is calculated over varying windows of time and then compared with the acceleration threshold. If the value is exceeded, then the processor detects a crash.
ACCIDENT NOTIFICATION SYSTEM
The notification system can be divided into two parts the client and the server. The TI CC3200 micro-controller acts as the client and the server is a cloud-based web service. The monitoring system makes use of the accelerometer value and GPS to send information to the cloud based notification system. A CC3200 device has the capability to behave as a station in a typical networking system. It can connect to access point and can use the Internet services via the same access point, if available.
CUSTOM APIs
The increased complexity associated with integrating monitoring, deployment, and ticketing systems results in ineffectual delivery of alert, straining the competent working of the helmet. The major problems that needed to be overcome include alert fatigue, possibility of missing an event, sending the message to a wrong person, increased time for information transfer and incident resolution. In order to overcome these drawbacks, we make use of an incident resolution platform PagerDuty. We make use of the PagerDuty REST API to inform the emergency contacts whenever an accident has been detected. The monitoring tools send PagerDuty a trigger event to report a new or ongoing problem. Incoming events that are sent via the API are routed to a PagerDuty service and processed.
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- Screenshot of Text Messages received by the motorist
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- The text message received by the emergency contact.
