School students devise one-of-a-kind tech solution to curb road accidents by trucks

Encountering a road accident and witnessing it with your own eyes can leave quite an impact. When a young student at Shiv Nadar School, Gurugram, told the story of his family having witnessed an accident a few years back where a truck ran over a 13-year-old girl on a bicycle, it ended up moving the rest of the youngsters in his school project team.

A survey in February 2022 denoted overspeeding as the major cause of road accidents caused by trucks in India. The second-biggest cause at 38% was fatigue and sleepiness due to driving for long hours.

Now, ‘Team Hifazat’, a team of six students from Shiv Nadar School, Gurugram, has come up with a device that can help reduce the number of road accidents caused by truck or cab drivers due to long hours of driving, fatigue and over-speeding.

FOUR COMPONENTS OF THE PLUG-AND-PLAY DEVICE

The plug-and-play device had four components, explains team member Lakshya Bajaj:

1. Raspberry Pi 4:

• The Raspberry Pi 4 is the brain of our device. It is like a mini-computer and all our code is stored inside it.
• It processes the live video feed and checks for the following:
• If the driver is drowsy. We used a library called media pipe which allowed us to get the face landmark points. We used these points to get the eye aspect ratio and the mouth aspect ratio.
• If the driver is using his/her mobile phone. It uses the same principles as the drowsiness detection and it allows us to check where his hand is.

2. Night vision camera:

• The night vision camera takes a live video feed of the driver driving and feeds it into the Raspberry Pi 4.
• It is able to collect clear frames in broad daylight as well as in low light conditions.

3. Arduino Uno:

• The arduino uno is a micro-controller and it assists the raspberry pi in controlling the rest of the hardware.
• The arduino is used for speed detection and the sending of text messages.

4. GSM/GPS Module

• The GPS module gives the exact location of the vehicle. We use this information to calculate the speed of the vehicle.
• The GSM module is used to send text messages (SMS) to the truck contractor if the driver continues to drive incorrectly.

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