Internet of Things (Iot) Enabled Automobile Accident Detection and Reporting System *

Abstract

The increase in number of road users, dangerous driving, bad roads and bad weather among others have increased road accidents, resulting in significant loss of lives and properties mostly due to inadequate emergency services. In 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that about 1.3 million lives are lost due to road mishaps yearly. The major factor that increases mortality after an accident occurs is the delay in emergency response. The system developed in this study provides a solution to this problem by leveraging on the Internet of Things (IoT) technology. The system consists of a hardware subsystem installed in a vehicle and a web application for emergency service operations. A microcontroller interacts with a vibration sensor, a tilt sensor, a flame sensor, GPS module and a network module for internet connection. An accident is detected when the vibration sensor detects a vibration greater than the defined threshold value. The microcontroller determines the orientation of the vehicle through the tilt sensor, checks for fire from the flame sensor and gets the vehicle's location from the GPS module. The microcontroller delays sending the information to the web application for 45 seconds so the driver can reset the system if an accident is falsely detected, after which the information about the accident is sent to the web application and the closest hospitals to the accident scene are identified. The hardware subsystem was programmed with $\mathbf{C}++$ and the web application was developed using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) and MySQL.