Chennai engineering students develop kit that alerts emergency services on accident

A potentially life-saving kit, that transforms a regular helmet or any vehicle into a smart one, has been developed by a group of students from Chennai's Karpagam College of Engineering. This kit has a motion detector attached to it that senses a crash and also a GPS which helps the emergency services to track the person who has met with an accident.

Uttar Pradesh/Tamil Nadu: A group of students from Chennai's Karpagam College of Engineering has developed a kit that can be installed into a helmet while riding a bike or any vehicle, and it alerts the emergency services, police as well as family members in case of an accident.

The kit, which transforms a regular helmet into a smart one, has a GPS attached to it which helps the emergency services to track the person who has met with an accident.

It also has a sensor with a motion detector which senses the crash.

The potentially life-saving kit was presented at the recently concluded Smart India Hackathon 2019 held at IIT-Kanpur by the students of Karpagam College of Engineering.

The clever kit comes in two varieties - one is portable and can be attached to any vehicle and the other one is fixed in a helmet. While the former costs anywhere between Rs. 1,000 to 1,500, both the kits together cost around Rs. 3,600.

Speaking to ETV Bharat, Ammu J Shahjahan, one of the innovators of the device, said, "In case of an accident, the GPS coordinates the device and detects the nearest hospital and also alerts emergency services. Most of the cars have airbags in them, but they don't send any emergency message to the relatives or friends, but if we attach this kit to the car and if there is an accident it would sound an alarm to the ambulance services sending the details of the accident site."

"It also consists of an indicator which will start blinking as soon as an accident takes place so that the person doesn't have to wait for the ambulance during night time as it would help other passersby to notice the accident," added the young student.

Although the invention couldn't make it to the winner's list, the device holds significance because of the fact that India registers very high incidence of road accidents. As per a National Crime Record Bureau report, a total of 4,80,652 road accidents had been registered in India in 2016 resulting in a loss of 1,50,785 lives and inflicting serious injuries to 4,94,624 people.