HDy Copilot: A Mobile Application for Automatic Accident Detection and Multimodal Alert Dissemination

The rapid technological growth is now providing global opportunities to enable intelligent transportation system (ITS) to tackle road traffic accidents which is considered one of the world’s largest public injury prevention problem. For this purpose, eCall is an initiative by EU with the purpose to bring rapid assistance to an accident location. This chapter 1 presents HDy Copilot, an application for acci- dent detection integrated with multimodal alert dissemination, both via eCall and IEEE 802.11p (ITS-G5). The proposed accident detection algorithm receives inputs from the vehicle, via ODB-II, and from the smartphone sensors, namely the accel- erometer, the magnetometer and the gyroscope.Android smartphone is used as hu- man machine interface, so that the driver can configure the application, receive road hazard warnings issued by other vehicles in the vicinity and cancel countdown pro- cedures upon false accident detection. The HDy Copilot is developed for Android OS as it provides open source APIs that allow access to its hardware resources. The application is implemented and tested on IEEE 802.11p based prototype and the generated results show that it successfully detects collisions, rollovers and performs the eCall along with sending Minimum Set of Data (MSD)