The Wireless Seat Belt Requirements, Experiments, and Solutions for Pedestrian Safety

The World Health Organization in its latest report on road safety states that 22% of all road traffic deaths comprise pedestrians, approximately 275,000 pedestrians worldwide. Based on an overview of typical accident scenarios, we argue how an ideal pedestrian safety system should look like. Then we investigate how much our approach of a pedestrian safety system, which we call "Wireless Seat Belt" (WSB), can satisfy the requirements of such an ideal system in terms of position accuracy. Next, we experimentally show what can be done with current smartphones in terms of these requirements. We show that current smartphone accuracy is not sufficient for reliable collision avoidance. To address this problem, we introduce and evaluate two approaches using context information to enable "off-the-shelf" smartphones to reach the required accuracy requirements.