Road Accident Reporting, Locating And Responding System Using Gis And Wireless Technologies: Case Study Kigali City

Abstract

Traffic accidents are one of the leading causes of fatalities in the world. An important indicator of survival rates after an accident is the time between the accident and when emergency medical personnel are dispatched to the scene. Eliminating the time when an accident occurred and when first responders are dispatched to the scene decreases mortality rate by 6% (white et al, 2009). One approach to eliminating the delay between accident occurrence and first responder dispatch is to use in-vehicle automatic accident detection and notifications systems which senses when traffic accident occur and immediately notify emergency personnel. These in-vehicle systems, however, are not available in all cars and are expensive to retrofit for older vehicles. The problem is that no such system in placel6r. focating or identifying where and when accident is taking place and responding to the ones in charge of road accident emergencies. The time by which police and emergency medical team approaches to accidental place, by that time usually many lives are lost because the time taken by information to approach rescue teams

are more enough. Therefore the main object of the research is to come up with a system that could report the accident, give the actual location of the accident area and respond to emergency responders in short time. The other objectives are to review the road accident problems in Rwanda and how they are handled to investigate on GIS, GPS and GSM technologies or systems for accident locating and responding. This paper therefore introduces the usage of automatic.accident reporting and notification systems such as use of mobile phones example smart phones that can be used to indirectly report accidents through the sensors such as GPS and other developed related applications. This paper also provides the following contributions to the study of reporting and locating road traffic accidents via smart phones: (1) we represent an overall solution system design model for accident reporting, locating and responding combines sensors and context data, (2) we show smart phone sensors, network connections and web services can be used to

provide situational awareness to first responders, and (3) we provide system prototype that implants the reporting and locating part of the system using smart phone and designed system interface for interaction. We also recommend further research to be carried out on how developing and implementing the combination of the three technologies such as GIS/GPS/GSM should be conducted in order to come up with an overalI solution of giving a rescue to injuries from road accidents.