This paper presents HDy Copilot, an Android application for accident detection integrated with multimodal alert dissemination, both via eCall and IEEE 802.11p. The proposed accident detection algorithm receives inputs from the vehicle, via ODB-II, and from the smartphone sensors, namely the accelerometer, the magnetometer and the gyroscope. The Android smartphone is also used as human machine interface, so that the driver can configure the application, receive road hazard warnings issued by other vehicles in the vicinity and cancel countdown procedures upon false accident detection. A prototype implementation was validated via laboratory tests.

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) standard has defined the Basic Set of Applications (BSA) which is composed of three main application classes road/traffic safety, traffic efficiency, and other value-added applications. Traffic safety applications strongly rely on the exchange of two types of safety messages that have been standardized by ETSI namely Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAMs) and Decentralized Environmental Notification Messages (DENMs). The ETSI's comprehensive and well documented standards present the structures and implementations guidelines of these safety messages yet there is lack of extensive work on the implementation and validation. Therefore, this paper presents a comprehensive architecture and implementation that has been developed to validate the potentials of CAM and DENM messaging capabilities. This paper evaluates the performance of CAM and DENM facilities through a custom IEEE 802.11p (ITS-G5) based prototype (IT2S) deployed in a field trial. The tests validates the CAM performance by tracking vehicles and various performance indicators such the packet error rate (PER), Received Signal strength (RSSI), connection distance between the OBUs and RSU, number of messages transmitted, GPS coordinates and successful packets received. Similarly, DENMs are validated by events such as traffic information, hazardous location and accidents. These tests motivate towards the unified solution for the implementation of a complete ITS.

This paper presents an enhanced emergency Call (eCall) system that combines the native eCall services with the benefits provided by vehicular communications networks. The proposed solution, named eCall++, consists of a mobile application that automatically detects an accident and disseminates the alert notification, both via eCall and vehicular communications standards (IEEE WAVE / ETSI ITS-G5). In this work, two additional services are introduced: a passenger detection algorithm that informs the emergency services about the number of people inside the car during the crash; and a video streaming mechanism that enables vehicles in the vicinity of the accident to send a live record of the accident scene. These features are developed and implemented on an Android device connected to a custom vehicular communications system (the IT2S platform). The experimentally obtained results validate the proposed system and provide viable evidence to add additional features to the conventional eCall architecture.