Z-Wave-Based Vehicular Blackbox with Automatic Emergency Assistance

One of the major concerns in today’s society is vehicular safety. Local governments and car manufacturers are working closely together to reduce the number of casualties by introducing different automatic emergency calling systems. This feature will be mandatory in European Union starting with 2018. But what happens to older cars? Our Blackbox is a simple and cheap solution to this problem and can be fitted to any car, regardless of age and model. Blackbox relies on a Raspberry Pi to collect data from several Z-Wave-based sensors mounted on the vehicle. This data is processed locally and then sent to the cloud back-end for further use by local authorities. In case of an accident, the emergency services are automatically informed about the location. The novelty of our solution consists in not relying solely on calling the ambulance, but also sending a distress signal to nearby cars using the same Z-Wave technology. We show that in some cases, this approach helps gain valuable time as victims can be tended to until the ambulance reaches the crash-site.