A novel idea to improve pedestrian safety in Black Spots using a hybrid VANET of vehicular and body sensors

With the rapid expansion of motor vehicle use, road safety is becoming a serious issue in the past few decades. Road pedestrian injuries and death rate is rising sharply. The research on traffic accidents points out to a concentration of crashes in "Black Spots". Accident black spots may be caused due to sharp corners in straight road, steep slopes, a hidden junction, concealed warning signs or situations where the oncoming traffic is concealed. However, the research on road safety has not yet found a solution to the problem. The histories of traffic accident cases establish dependencies between the accident and the reaction time of the pedestrian and/or driver. This is mainly due to instant reactions caused by panic while facing a real time potentially dangerous scenario. We provide a solution by proposing a VANET based driver alert system. An alert given to the drivers ahead of time gives a better chance for the drivers to react in a way as to avoid accidents. The system is designed by including body sensors as part of the VANET. The signals received by the vehicular nodes in the VANET are given as input to the alert system. The driver is cautioned which in turn speeds up his reaction time. The system was simulated and it was seen that the chances of accident drastically reduces with the alert system.