A Mobile solution for road accident data collection and presentation
Date
2014
Authors
Kenga, Mosoti Derdus
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
iLabAfrica
Abstract
Road accidents are major cause of injuries and death in Kenya. The number of road accidents is the ultimate measure of the level of road safety in any country. Although there are many road safety agents used by government and non-government organizations in trying to solve and find better solutions for road safety, they seem not effective. A critical key to support road safety management is accident data. Therefore, it is crucial to build a road accident database and data retrieval system as a fundamental resource in improving road safety.Since the accident database needs to hold reliable data, accurate methods for accident data collection must be used. Access to such data is important because it enables road safety stakeholders to formulate sound safety measures, and evaluate those measures that are already in place. This study focuses on improving accident data collection by using a smart phone-based application. The application's aim is to improve data collection, while supporting mobility,ubiquity and accuracy.Using the mobile application, recorded accident data is sent to a central database for storage and can be retrieved by the same application. The type of information collected is determined by the Model Minimum Uniform Crash Criteria (MMUCC), National Institute of Statistics (NIS) and accident data set used by the Kenyan police. Location information recording is supported and depends entirely on smart phone inbuilt GPS module and Google places API. Image evidence is achieved through capture of accident scene photos using the smart phone camera. The application provides a web interface for office based managers, who can use Google maps to
identify accident hotspots by mining location information from the database. The application will be built on android platform, and then tested against functional and non-functional requirements.Testing will involve live demos of tasks on selected test cases while indicating utilized use cases.Primary users will be involved during the testing process.This application assumes that a driving license, driver point-based penalty and vehicle registration sub-systems exist. Integration of these systems will significantly reduce the amount of information to be recorded during accident data collection. This study found that there was need for new ways of accident data collection and the mobile application was an innovative solution for that purpose.
Description
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Mobile Telecommunications and Innovation