Accident Detection and Reporting System Using Gps, Gprs and Gsm Technology

International Conference on Informatics, Electronics & Vision Accident Detection and Reporting System using GPS, GPRS and GSM Technology Md. Syedul Amin, Jubayer Jalil Department of Electrical, Electronic and Systems Engineering Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia 43600 UKM, Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia M. B. I. Reaz Department of Electrical, Electronic and Systems Engineering Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia 43600 UKM, Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia email: mamun. reaz@gmail. com Abstract— Speed is one of the basic reasons for vehicle accident.

Many lives could have been saved if emergency service could get accident information and reach in time. Nowadays, GPS has become an integral part of a vehicle system. This paper proposes to utilize the capability of a GPS receiver to monitor speed of a vehicle and detect accident basing on monitored speed and send accident location to an Alert Service Center. The GPS will monitor speed of a vehicle and compare with the previous speed in every second through a Microcontroller Unit.

Whenever the speed will be below the specified speed, it will assume that an accident has occurred. The system will then send the accident location acquired from the GPS along with the time and the speed by utilizing the GSM network. This will help to reach the rescue service in time and save the valuable human life. Keywords-accident monitoring, GPS, accident detection, GPRS, GSM. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a popular technology which was developed by American Department of Defense (DoD) for military use.

Later on it was available for civilian use. It is utilized for wide range of applications such as location, direction, speed, timing, surveying, logistics, traffic management, security etc. Nowadays, it has become an integral part of a vehicle system for tracking and navigation system. It can provide accurate time, location coordinate and speed. On the other hand, Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) is a digital mobile telephony system that is widely used. More than 690 mobile networks provide GSM services across 213 countries and GSM represents 82. % of all global mobile connections. Besides the voice communication it also offers Short Message Service (SMS) and General packet radio service (GPRS) to transfer data. This paper proposes to utilize the capability of a GPS receiver to monitor the speed of a vehicle and detect an accident basing on the monitored speed and send the location and time of the accident from the GPS data processed by a microcontroller by using the GSM network to the Alert Service Center. The rest of the paper is organized as follows.

The Related Work section discusses about the researches related to the accident detection system, the Equipment and Proposed Methodology section describes the required equipments and algorithm to detect the accident, the Accident Detection and Reporting Procedure describes the procedure to calculate the speed to detect accident and sending procedure and finally the paper is concluded. II. RELATED WORK I. INTRODUCTION The development of a transportation system has been the generative power for human beings to have the highest civilization above creatures in the earth. Automobile has a great importance in our daily life.

We utilize it to go to our work place, keep in touch with our friends and family, and deliver our goods. But it can also bring disaster to us and even can kill us through accidents. In 2009, 33,808 people died in vehicle traffic crashes only in USA [1]. Speed is one of the most important and basic risk factors in driving. It not only affects the severity of a crash, but also increases risk of being involved in a crash. Despite many efforts taken by different governmental and non-governmental organizations all around the world by various programs to aware against careless driving, yet accidents are taking place every now and then.

However, many lives could have been saved if the emergency service could get the crash information in time. A study by Virtanen et al. shows that 4. 6% of the fatalities in accidents could have been prevented only in Finland if the emergency services could be provided at the place of accident at the proper time [2]. As such, an efficient automatic accident detection with an automatic notification to the emergency service with the accident location is a prime need to save the precious human life. Many researchers carried out their studies on accident detection system.

Traditional traffic accident prediction uses long-term traffic data such as annual average daily traffic and hourly volume. In contrast to traditional traffic accident prediction, real-time traffic accident prediction relates accident occurrences to real-time traffic data obtained from various detectors such as induction loops, infrared detector, camera etc. Real-time traffic accident prediction focuses on the change of traffic conditions before an accident occurrence, while traffic incident detection studies are concerned with the change of traffic conditions after an incident occurrence [3].

However, the performance of these detection and prediction 978-1-4673-1154-0/12/$31. 00 ©2012 IEEE ICIEV 2012 IEEE/OSA/IAPR International Conference on Informatics, Electronics & Vision system is greatly restricted by the number of monitoring sensor, available fund, algorithms used to confirm an accident, weather, traffic flow etc. Besides the automatic detection system, manual incident detection methods detects the accident from the motorist report, transportation department or public crews report, aerial surveillance or close circuit camera surveillance.

The drawback of this type of detection system is that someone has to witness the incident. Moreover, there are delays and inaccuracies due to the expression problem of the witness. Compared to these detection method, driver initiated incident detection system has more advantages which includes the quick reaction, more incident information etc. However, with the severity of the accident, driver may not be able to report at all. Conventional built-in automatic accident detection system utilizes impact senor or the car airbag senor to detect an accident and GPS to locate the accident place. L. Chuan-zhi et al. roposed a freeway incident detection system by utilizing the car air bag sensor and accelerometer, GPS to locate the accident place and GSM to send the accident location [4]. However, the system did not utilize the GPS to detect the accident. A smart phone based accident detection system is proposed by C. Thompson et al. [5]. However, smart phones are very expensive and due to false alarm filter, it may not detect all accidents. An acoustic accident detection method is proposed by D. A. Whitney and J. J. Pisano [6]. There are possibilities of false alarm in the system and also does not guarantee the occurrence of an accident.

An accident detection by utilizing an impact sensor and reporting system by wireless module is proposed by R. K. Megalingam et al. [7]. However, a wireless reporting infrastructure is very expensive and difficult to implement as installation of repeated receivers on the road at a very short interval are required. The proposed method aims to overcome the above mentioned limitations and utilizes only the GPS data to detect the accident and GSM network to send the location and activate a voice channel with the Alert Service Center. III. EQUIPMENTS AND PROPOSED METHODOLOGY B.

GSM/GPRS Modem The GSM/GPRS modem utilizes the GSM network to send the location of the accident. The modem can be controlled by a microcontroller through AT Command set. The Wavecom Q2403 is proposed for this system. It supports dual frequency (GSM/GPRS 900/1800MHz) with voice function and RS-232 interface. This modem supports all the AT Commands. C. Microcontroller Unit The microcontroller unit (MCU) is the heart of the system. It receives data from the GPS, processes all data and detects the accident from the processed data. The location of the accident is also sent by the microcontroller.

PIC18F4550 is proposed for the system. The Large amounts of RAM for buffering, Enhanced Flash program memory and low power consumption make it ideal for the proposed system. D. Accident Detection Algorithm Speed is one of the most important and basic risk factors in driving. It not only affects the severity of a crash, but also increases risk of being involved in a crash. People need some processing time to decide whether or not to react and then to execute an action. At high speeds the distance between starting to brake and a complete stand still is longer.

The braking distance is proportional to the square of speed [8]. Therefore, the possibility to avoid a collision becomes smaller as speed increases. A moving body contains kinetic energy according to (1). When an accident occurs, kinetic energy is transformed into destructive forces [9] cause injury to occupants as well as to the vehicle. KineticEnergy = 1 mv 2 2 (1) where m = mass of object and v = speed of the vehicle. When brake is applied, two forces work on the vehicle to decelerate the speed. One is the gravitational force (g) and the other one is the friction force (f).

Considering the friction coefficient 0. 8 for a plain road surface and standard gravitational force (9. 8 metres per square second), from the Equation 2, we can get the final speed of a vehicle (u) after one second once the brake is applied. This is the maximum speed after considering the deceleration factors. Table 1 shows the maximum speed starting from the initial speed of 160 kph after one second once the brake is applied. As such, if the speed is less than these maximum speed, than it would be assumed that some other deceleration force worked on the vehicle to reduce the speed and an accident has occurred.

A. GPS Receiver The sensor for the accident detection is the GPS receiver. Nowadays, GPS technology has become more accurate, smaller, reliable, and economical. A very sensitive and accurate GPS signal acquiring device is required for the system. HI204III Ultra High Sensitive GPS receiver of Haicom Electronics Corporation is proposed for this project. The receiver continuously tracks all satellites in view and provides accurate satellite positioning data. Its 20 parallel channels and 4000 search bins provide fast satellite signal acquisition and short startup time which is