JACO GERRITS Our aim has always been to make a large contribution to road safety and reduce roadside fatalities and injuries
The locally developed emergency response CrashDetech smartphone application (app) will compete against international social businesses and technologies as part of The Venture competition in New York, next month.
CrashDetech is in talks to potentially deploy the solution in Zambia, the UK, Australia and Guatemala, says CrashDetech founder and CEO Jaco Gerrits.
The app, which can be downloaded and tested free of charge for 30 trips a month, uses sophisticated algorithms and the capabilities of smartphones, including accelerometers, global positioning system and other sensors, to detect when a person has been in a serious collision and requires emergency medical assistance.
Severe accidents typically generate more than 30 G (30 times the force of gravity), yet smartphone accelerometers have much lower limits of forces they can detect.
Significant work went into ensuring that the algorithm is robust and that it does not send false positives to the emergency control centre. This is done by using additional functions of the phone and specific identifying patterns. The app can distinguish between, for example, the dropping of a phone and an accident, notes Gerrits.
When an accident is detected, the CrashDetech emergency control centre automatically receives a notification of where the accident occurred. The medical details of the user are then sent, along with the accident’s location, to emergency medical respondents. They are dispatched based on their proximity to the accident, reducing response times.
The app automatically switches on when it detects that the user is travelling, and does not run when the person is not travelling to save battery power and phone resources. It functions as effectively for public transport as for personal transport.
“The aim is to help people after an accident, when they are unable to call for help. Traffic collisions and fatalities are a worldwide problem and we are in discussions with medical emergency and insurance firms to offer the app to their users. They can integrate our crash detection technology into their apps or brand the app in their corporate colours, but it will run on our servers and use our technology.”
Gerrits notes CrashDetech will retain its control over the systems to ensure that a high quality of service is enforced and, consequently, that emergencies are responded to immediately and effectively.
The CrashDetech app is a subscription service, with an entry-level monthly fee of R49. The R109 a month premium service enables subscribers to distribute the app to five devices, thereby protecting a user’s immediate family and dependants.
“Our aim has always been to make a large contribution to road safety and reduce roadside fatalities and injuries. Transport-related incidents cause about 1.3-million deaths a year and cost developing economies more than $100-billion a year, indicating the need for such services, and the potential for such technologies to dramatically reduce fatalities, injuries and costs.”
An emergency button, once pressed, sends an alert to the emergency control centre and can be used to access medical response without a collision being detected, such as in the event of heart attacks or other emergencies.
The next stage of development for CrashDetech will entail using drones carrying emergency medical supplies. The drones will be automatically dispatched to provide assistance and visual and audio information to respondents travelling to the location of the emergency.
The app has many other functionalities and can be downloaded from www.crashdetech.com, Gerrits concludes.