Platform enabling intelligent safety applications for vulnerable road users

In 2009, 9108 vulnerable road users (VRUs; pedestrians and bicyclists) died in the EU and 4722 in the US. Active safety systems, that is intelligent systems able to predict and prevent crashes, may significantly help to reduce VRU fatalities and injuries; however, current active safety systems for VRUs are only found on high-end vehicles, only support the host vehicle driver, and do not make use of wireless communication. The scope of this study is to describe the set-up and real-world verification of a platform to enable active safety systems for VRU. This platform is carried by VRUs and may support multiple road users using wireless communication. A simple conceptual application, addressing pedestrian safety at crossings, was developed to test the platform. This application was not cooperative (i.e. did not support multiple road users with wireless communication). The results presented in this study suggest that such a platform can be employed (i) as a logger for naturalistic studies on VRUs, (ii) to better understand VRU behaviour and accident causation and (iii) as a basis for the development of novel active safety applications, running on portable devices, such as future generation smart phones, and possibly enabled by wireless communication.