Every year hundreds of pedestrians and cyclists become victims of road accidents. We truly believe that technology can reduce this number very easily and PedSafety aims to do that. PedSafety helps pedestrians in numerous ways and ensures that they obey the traffic rules. It is the perfect companion app for pedestrians.
We obtained the inspiration of the idea from two sources:
- Existing Look Up application
- The ordered movement of animal groups in nature
To use all the features of this application, Bluetooth beacons need to be installed on the traffic lights. The bluetooth beacons are very economical and can be easily installed on the traffic lights. When a person with the PedSafety app reaches a traffic intersection, the application can detect the bluetooth beacon. If the person is crossing the road, the application would disable the phone functionality and display a "Look Up" overlay on the screen. It helps users to keep their eyes on the road and not on phone while crossing. Once the user reaches the other side of the road, the application detects the other beacon and provides reward points to users for using the zebra crossing. This encourages people to use the zebra crossing and not cross the road on any other points.
This application is very useful for the Government authorities as well. The app can be used to send anonymous pedestrian and cyclists traffic information to the authorities. The bluetooth beacons can detect the intersections with high pedestrian density and routes with high cyclist density. These statistics can help authorities take informed decisions and build subways/overbridges and cycle lanes wherever required.
The application also includes a floating camera which helps the pedestrians to see the sidewalk in the phones itself while using the phone. This nifty feature ensures pedestrians don't collide and avoid pits.
We started by observing and listing down the problems faced by pedestrians and cyclists. Lack of pedestrian and cycle lanes is one of the biggest issues. We started to build this application with the aim of solving this problem and the problem of pedestrian road accidents.
We looked at various existing solutions and found that a very simple solution already exists. It was called Look Up. In our application we added that functionality and various other features.
To gather pedestrian and cyclists data, we thought of using bluetooth beacon for higher accuracy. The authorities can also easily program the beacons to send awareness messages to all the pedestrians and cyclists.
We had to come up with a low-cost solution which can effectively solve the problems of the pedestrians and cyclists. We all know that in ordered animal movements, every agent tries to optimise the movement of the team. The existing traffic solutions try to imitate this for humans by ordering their movement. The challenge we had was to gamify the existing system in a way which can ensure that pedestrian and cyclists obey the traffic rules.
We believe that the current reward systems can easily be transformed into a redeemable award systems. This would give people more incentive to obey the traffic laws.
We built one nifty feature which allows pedestrians to look ahead on the path while using their phones. We think that it is one nice thing which we built which we have already started using in our everyday lives.
We have thought of various features which can be integrated in this application in future. Some of them are:
- Using Google Maps and current location to detect traffic violations done by people.
- Suggesting the most optimal routes for the cyclists based on the current traffic situations in the city.
- Adding new reward mechanisms for people to make ensure they obey the traffic rules.