International Conference on Trends in Electronics and Informatics
ICEI 2017
Real Time Detection and Reporting of Vehicle
Collision
Parag Parmar
Dept. of E & TC,
College of Engineering Pune (COEP)
parag.c.parmar@gmail.com
Abstract— Road accidents is the major cause of deaths in
India. India had been ranked number one in the number of
deaths due to accidents. This is some serious matter at hands and
measures need to be taken to save the lives of the victim. The
victim's lives can be saved by providing proper medical aid on
time. Statistics show that many of times when the accident is
severe, the witnesses to the accident or the passersby are
reluctant to help because of the long procedures of reporting the
accident to the police and the inquiry involved. This brings us to
design a system wherein we won’t have to depend on other people
to come to the victim's rescue. Also, many a times the victim, if
conscious, is unable to inform the medical emergency providers
about his/ her exact location details, nearby landmark etc. due to
the trauma or because of not being familiar with the area. This
makes it important that the accident location be automatically
sent to the emergency facility. This project aims at developing a
system that can detect the occurrence of the accident, inform
about the accident to the victim's family on the pre-defined
numbers and locates the nearest hospital and inform them about
the accident so they can immediately send medical help. This
prototype makes use of gyroscope, accelerometer, GPS, GSM and
auto dialer. The MPU6050 MEMS sensor detects the occurrence
of accident with the help of 3-axis gyroscope and 3-axis
accelerometer. With the auto dialer feature, the family of the
victim is informed. The GPS module reads the accurate location
of the accident spot and this information is sent to the emergency
providers. This system has helped in reducing the response time
to the accident by reporting to the hospitals efficiently. This has
been vital in saving the lives of the victims.
Keywords—vehicle collision; gyroscope; accelerometer;
MEMS; GPS; GSM; auto dialer;
I. INTRODUCTION
The number of vehicles on Indian roads are rising
exponentially since a past few decades. Government statistics
suggest that the number of registered vehicles on Indian roads
have increased by sumptuous 273% since 2000. The rising
number of vehicles has resulted in increased vehicle density
on roads and this in turn has resulted in the increased
requirement on the driver to be alert while driving. With such
large number of vehicles on road the probability of meeting
with an accident also increases. India ranks first in the
frequency of vehicle collisions across the world. The major
causes of these accidents are over speeding, not following the
traffic signals, drunken driving, not wearing helmet or seatbelt
978-1-5090-4257-9/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE
Ashok M. Sapkal
Dept. of E & TC,
College of Engineering Pune (COEP)
ams.extc@coep.ac.in
and overtaking from the wrong side The Global New Car
Assessment Programme (GNCAP) had released its car crash
test results in May, 2016 which showed that most of the cars
in India are very low on safety features. Despite constant
efforts by governmental and non-governmental organizations
to create awareness among people, reckless driving is still on a
rise. As per the NDTV report, 1214 road accidents occur every
day in India in which 377 people die each day and 3490 are
injured. India has recorded highest number of accident deaths
compared to other countries but this issue has not received as
much attention as it deserves. Road accidents have become a
regular affair in India. The fatalities involved in a car accident
is dependent on factors such as the intensity of the crash, the
safety features embedded in the vehicle and the availability of
the emergency medical services. 60% of these deaths are due
to unavailability of proper emergency medical facilities within
one hour of occurrence of accident which is termed as the
golden hour. Assisting the victims immediately after the crash
is instrumental in saving their lives. There are three phases
involved in the crash requiring different level of medical
emergency services-
Phase 1: Involves casualties occurring during the first few
seconds up to a minute after the crash. The accidents involved
are intense and chances of survival are thin. This phase had
10% of all recorded deaths due to accident
Phase 2: This phase is the golden hour phase wherein life can
be saved if proper medical facility is made available. The
death rate is 75% in this phase.
Phase 3: It is the phases where the victim suffers from trauma.
It can last up to weeks and requires proper treatment. It
involves in 15% of the total deaths.
By providing proper medical aid in the second phase can save
the victim’s life. The matter at hand is minimizing the
response time of emergency services to reach the victims. As
the time passes the chances of the victim to survive the crash
reduces if proper medical aid is not provided. Analysis have
shown that, lessening the response time by just 1 minute rises
the chances of lives saved by 6%. The response time can be
reduced by taking following measures
x Detecting accident quickly and accurately.
x Reporting the accident to the nearby hospitals
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x Immediate evacuation of the victims trapped in the
vehicle
An automated system that will accurately detect the
accident and its intensity and send the information to the
nearby hospital will save a lot of rescue time. The time taken to
report the event to the authority is also reduced. This was
necessary measure because it has been observed that witness to
the crash often hesitate to help the victim because of the police
reporting procedure involved. The automated system will be
instrumental in increasing the chances of survival of the victim.
II. LITERATURE SURVEY
Several methods have been applied in the past to detect the
accidents and report them. The research analysis of these
methods has been done and the proposed system is based on
the best feature extracted from each one.
Watthanawisuth N. had a black box consisting of MEMS
accelerometer and a GPS module to monitor the vehicle. A
threshold is set on the parameters which helps in detecting the
accident. The black box, on recognizing the accident sends a
message containing the details of the location of the crash to
the emergency hospital and family members. As against this
method, Hoang Dat Pham had proposed a system wherein
mobile network was used to track the vehicle. The location is
obtained from the GPS and transmitted via the GSM module.
Global operability was possible using this method. Salas K
Jose proposed that the vehicle number be sent along with the
location to further reduce the time for police complaint. Using
LPC2148 MCU, a higher sensitivity and accuracy is obtained,
says C. Prabha. C. Prabha also interfaced EEPROM with the
microcontroller to save the mobile numbers permanently. The
system is required to be easily accessible by the authorities
and have a global operation apart from being reasonable in
price. This is achieved by using the built-in APIs for GPS and
GSM on the android platform, as proposed by Vikram
Kushwaha. Another method to detect collision is to measure
the magnetic field using magneto resistive and sonar sensors
as proposed by Shih-Ken Chen. This enables us to determine
the relative position, speed and the vehicle orientation based
on the readings from the sensors. Another system that used
fisheye lens camera was proposed by Md. Syedul Amin. S.
Taghvaeeyan captured the images of occurred accidents and
sent them along with text messages to predefined numbers.
This system uses Quad- Band GSM/GPRS module. All these
fore mentioned methods were to detect a head-on crash. It is
also important to take into consideration other types of
crashes, determine the intensity of crash and its type. For this
Silvere Bonnabel proposed the use of sensor technology to
detect the roll over crash.
Fig.2. System Flow
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ICEI 2017
III. PROPOSED SYSTEM
The idea being proposed is to automate the notification system
of road accidents that reduces the response time to aid the
medical services to reach the people who meet with an
accident as this will help in reducing the number of human
deaths in road accidents. Current trend shows that all the
major automobile companies focus is on how they can provide
better and efficient safety systems in their vehicles as it will
help in providing the medical treatment on time and save the
life of their respective customers. The proposed system of
vehicle collision detection and reporting, can detect the
occurrence of crash of vehicle may it be collision or a roll over
and as soon as accident happens it will report about the
occurrence to the family members or relatives by using the
text message and to the nearby hospital as it will save the
response time to provide the medical aid to the injured
passengers. This system has been pictorially depicted in fig.1.
The system is a microcontroller based which is interfaced with
the MEMS sensor consisting of accelerometer and gyroscope
along with Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM)
and Global Positioning System (GPS). The key component
behind detecting the collisions is the accelerometer and
gyroscope. The 3-axis accelerometer gives the G-forces along
x, y and z axis. The direction in which crash happens produce
a drastic variation in G-forces along that axis remarkably
along x- and y-axis. Howbeit, the rotation angles viz. roll,
pitch and yaw along the x, y and z axis are computed from 3-
axis gyroscope. For analyzing the rollover of vehicle roll and
pitch angles are sufficient as yaw isn’t affected by the rollover.
Fig.1. System Block Diagram
Thus, the values combined from accelerometer and gyroscope
provides an efficient way of determining the occurrence of
accident instead of using a single sensor.
The different phases of the proposed system with
manifestation on data acquisition, filtration and its analysis has
been further discussed in the following sections, system flow
being depicted in fig.2.
A. Data Acquisition
The MEMS sensor is interfaced with the ATmega328
microcontroller for acquisition of real time values. The
MPU6050 sensor integrates a 3-axis accelerometer and 3-axis
gyroscope in a single chip, together with digital motion
processor, to process complex algorithms. The 16-bits analog-
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to-digital convertor in MPU6050 provides better accuracy and
it communicates using I2C protocol with other devices. It is
designed to have precise slow and fast motions, provided by
accelerometer and gyroscope having user programmable range
of ±2g, ±4g, ±8g and ±16g and ±250, ±500, ±1000 and ±2000
°/sec respectively.
As the accident happens, the microcontroller processes the
proposed algorithm by acquiring the current sensor values and
according to that determines whether a collision or crash or
both has happened.
The process of data acquisition can be described as follows:
1. The algorithm starts with initialization of
microcontroller and configuration with MPU6050,
GPS and GSM module.
2. The MPU6050 communicates over Inter-Integrated
Circuit (I2C) protocol with the microcontroller. This
serial protocol is efficient, powerful and flexible as
compared to Serial Peripheral Interface Protocol
(SPI). It also supports multi-master system, which
allows more than one master to have control over the
bus to communicate with other devices. The transfer
data rate supported by this bus is up to 400khz. The
MPU6050 sensors accelerometer and gyroscope are
configured as:
i. The accelerometer is initialized with a full-scale
range of ±8g as the acceleration recorded for the
world’s fastest car Bugatti Veyron from 0 to
100km/h in 2.4s is 1.55g. Also, the acceleration
force required for space shuttles during launch is
under 8g only.
ii. The gyroscope is configured with a full-scale range
of ±500 degree/second which is sufficient for our
purpose, as there are less chances of vehicle going
above that level.
3. The GPS and GSM module communicates with
microcontroller using serial and software serial port
enabling to use both the modules simultaneously
B. Data Filteration and Analysis
A collision or rollover of vehicle is determined based on data
obtained from the accelerometer and gyroscope. In
accelerometers, for determining the orientation angle it is
essential to know that there is a constant gravitational force of
1g acting downwards on it. If z-axis is oriented along the
gravitational axis, it is impossible to calculate rotation along z-
axis from accelerometer. However, it provides accurate
orientation angle if only gravitational force is acting on it. If
external force is applied when it is moving or rotating, there is
fluctuation in readings. Thus, readings are more reliable when
measured over a long span of time.
In case of calculating orientation from gyroscope it is quite
different as it measures angular velocity. We first calibrate the
sensor values and then compute angular velocity at required
time interval over x, y and z-axis. The product gives the
change in angle. The new orientation angle is the sum with
previous one. Thus, it is a kind of integration which produce
systematic errors over a period, leading to drift in values.
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ICEI 2017
For a short term, the gyroscope data is used as it responds
quickly and is not influenced by external forces. For a long
term, the accelerometer data don’t drift over time and is
unstable for short term. The complimentary filter gives “best
of both world” kind of thing. The complimentary filter takes
the angle calculated from accelerometer and rotation angle in
degree/second from gyroscope and applies digital high pass
filter on gyroscope and digital low pass filter on accelerometer
as can be seen in below equation
Angle α* (Angle Gyro * dt) (1 - α) * Angle Accl (1)
where,
α: floating point value ranging from 0.9 to almost 1,
depending on the efficiency of gyroscope and accelerometer
and the required fine tuning of filter
AngleGyro: Angle computed from gyroscope data
AngleAccl: Angle computed from accelerometer data
The decision whether a vehicle collision or rollover has
occurred is taken depending on the angle measured using the
filter and the vehicle speed. Both the conditions are observed
and a decision is taken which helps in gathering necessary
information for emergency service providers. These two cases
are described in brief below:
1. Vehicle Collision
The collision of a vehicle leads to a drastic change in vehicle
speed and shows a direct impact on acceleration force along
that axis of crash. As the z-axis is oriented along the
gravitational force direction, only x- and y-axis of
accelerometer is required to determine the happening and
direction of vehicle collision. The change in acceleration force
is quite drastic during a severe collision as compared to the
jerk produced during acceleration or deceleration of vehicle as
it is quite a smooth process. Thus, the proposed system
computes the resultant of acceleration forces and takes the
difference of consecutive readings which is compared with a
threshold value. Furthermore, for efficiency the vehicle speed
is also checked using GPS whether there is degradation in
speed or not. Thus, both the threshold value and vehicle speed
helps in accurate determination of collision. Henceforth, the
notification is activated by gathering the location from GPS
and sends the emergency message to the family and nearby
hospital.
2. Vehicle Rollover
The angle obtained from the complementary filter is used to
determine the rollover of vehicle. Technically, an angle
greater than 46 degrees and less than -46 degrees leads to
rollover of the vehicle. Other than the threshold of roll and
pitch values, the weight and center of gravity of vehicle plays
an important role in rollover. Different threshold can also be
used to warn about the possibility of rollover to the driver.
Once the threshold is reached, the notification system will be
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ICEI 2017

activated informing the family and nearby hospital about the (3)
occurrence of vehicle rollover. (4)
C. Notification System where,
∆lat: difference of latitude
The aim of notification system is to notify about the incident
∆lon: difference of longitude
of vehicle accident to the family members and the nearest
a: square of half of the chord between the points
hospital in the vicinity so that quick emergency services can
c: angular distance in radians
be provided to the injured helping to save the precious human
d: distance between the points
life. Notification system gets activated once the threshold for
detection is reached. The GPS module computes the exact
By using this formula, shortest distance is calculated.
location of vehicle accident and then GSM module sends the
According to that, nearest hospital so obtained is reported
text message of accident to the family members and using
about the occurrence and location of accident. If hospital
GPRS of GSM module the latitude and longitude obtained
doesn’t respond, next nearest hospital is searched and that
from the GPS is sent to the server. The server then determines
hospital is notified about accident. After hospital responds to
the nearest hospital to that location by measuring the great
the notification, the victim is notified that the emergency
circle distance given by haversine formula. It provides better
service is on the way. All this information is also sent as a
accuracy and speed as compared with other algorithms like
message to family members so that they can take the
great circle distance, spheroidal model of earth and Vincenty’s
necessary steps to reach the person.
formula. The haversine formula calculates the shortest
distance between two points considering the spherical surface
of earth. The haversine formula is given as in equations (2), IV. FLOWCHART
( )
(3) and (4).
Fig.3. shows the logical flow of the proposed system. The
step by step description of the process has been given.
(2)

Fig.3. Flowchart

V. RESULTS

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ICEI 2017

The System has been designed on the board and tested using regular turbulent driving to an accident. The sensor readings
different dummy car models. The results obtained have been of the orientation angle just before the accident, during the
showing high accuracy in terms of detecting an accident. The crash and after the crash has been plotted in fig.4.
system has also been intelligent enough to not mistake a

Fig.4. Plot of orientation angle against time

Fig.5. Plot of gyroscope, accelerometer and filtered readings of position sensor

The output of filter applied on the accelerometer and shows that filter plot is smooth as compared with the
gyroscope for smooth readings is plotted on fig.5. The plot disturbances present in sensor readings.

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Fig.6 Plot of vibration during collision
As observed from the graph of fig.6, the readings are nearly
constant before and after the crash as they should ideally be.
During the crash, there is a turbulence in the readings. A
threshold helps in determining the occurrence of accident as
there is large variation in acceleration force within short span
of time when the vehicle collides.
VI. CONCLUSION
A system to detect an event of accident has been developed.
The system, on occurrence of accident, reads the exact latitude
and longitude of the vehicle involved in accident and sends
this information to the nearest emergency service provider. It
is necessary that the family be informed about the catastrophe.
Keeping this in mind, the system also includes the feature of
informing the family of the victim. The Automated accident
detection and notification system is observed to detect
accident with high efficiency using the MPU6050 MEMS
sensor with 3-axis gyroscope and 3-axis accelerometer. The
location is accurately detected and emergency facility centers
informed well in time. The time to inform the hospital is
reduced greatly providing quick response for medical aid. This
system thus eliminates the chances of miscommunication in
informing the medical emergency facility provider about the
accident which has in turn been an opportunity to save the
lives of the victim of the crash. This system has been
important in the sense that it has enabled to reduce the
response time of medical emergency facility on an event of
accident thus saving plenty of valuable human life.
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ICEI 2017
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