Context system using pervasive Controller Area Network bus system to improve driving safety

With more than one million people dying worldwide on the roads every year and lots of money in property loses, traffic safety remains an unsolved matter. The potentials of in-vehicle safety systems are currently investigated to improve this situation. Hence, embedded system which can collect some important context information and warn the driver in order to improve the safety of driving is needed. A Controller Area Network (CAN) bus with nodes of sensors or the node which is connected directly to the vehicle´s CAN bus is very practical and powerful to collect driver´s context information. This context information should not be just kept in the vehicles; it should be shared with vehicles in the same neighborhood or be sent to the information processing center. In order to have a wireless communication, communication technologies like ZigBee, GPRS are needed to be used. In this paper, we propose a context aware system for improving road safety and efficiency as well as driving comfort. The studied system is composed of the CAN bus and wireless communication system, a prototype of this system on the vehicle was also designed and tested in Citroen C4 car. A CAN bus was designed and realized by authors. Then, some context information from the vehicle existent CAN is collected and an experimental test is made.