“The typical day of every human being starts with waking up late and getting ready for work in a hurry. The workplace will not be very near, one has to travel a significant distance or around 30 minutes on an average. People choose different modes of transport to commute from their home to the workplace and vice versa. Just by driving 30 mins to and fro people get tired like hell due to traffic and bad road conditions especially in developing nations like India.
Now imagine the situation of cab drivers and truck drivers who drive at least 14 to 16 hours a day. In developing nations like India the more attention is given to cost-cutting and high production rate and not to ergonomics and anthropometry of seat design. Due to this reason drivers face fatigue at the end of the day and feel drowsiness while driving. This causes accidents and loss of innocent lives. Last year 1.25M people died due to road accidents. The main cause of these road accidents is nothing but bad road conditions and distracted driver.
Driver distraction may happen due to many reasons such as attending a call physically, try to fiddle with entertainment system, drowsiness due to fatigue etc. By image processing, we can solve the problem of driver distraction by alerting him or her with haptic and voice feedback via speakers. The image processing techniques such as face tracking and drowsiness detection can be implemented using OpenCV or Deep Neural Network on Spresense Board.
Features
IGo will have following features:
1. Speed limit alerts
2. Drowsiness detection and alerting
3. OBDII data logging along with GPS coordinates
4. KML map generation
5. Road damage detection using IMU data
And many more coming soon…
Let’s see why these features really matters.
Speed limit alerts: This will help the driver to know the speed via voice feedback, thanks to Sony Spresense board. This helps is reducing the driver distraction since driver has to look down to get speedometer reading. This also helps in maintaining or restricting speed in the case of over speeding in urban areas which is also a major cause of accidents. Also it is helpful in rental cars where there will be strict restriction over speed limits.
Here’s a part of a report by European Commission for Road Safety
Higher Speeds, More Accidents
High speed reduces the possibility to respond in time when necessary. People need time to process information, to decide whether or not to react and, finally to execute a reaction. At high speed the distance covered in this period is longer. At high speeds the distance between starting to brake and a complete stand still is longer as well. The braking distance is proportional to the square of speed (v2). Therefore, the possibility to avoid a collision becomes smaller as speed increases. This is well illustrated at a broad average level by Finch [24].
1 km/hincrease in speed→ 3% increase in accidents
In practice the relationship is more complex. The exact relationship depends among many other things on speed level and road type.
The higher the speed, the steeper the increase in accident risk
The relationship between speed and accident risk is a power function: With increasing speed, the accident risk increases more as the absolute speed is higher.”