In 2010, 2083 cyclists died while riding bicycles in Europe. Many of those accidents occurred at road intersections, typically involving one vehicle and one bicycle, and were caused by distraction or inattention of either the driver or the cyclist. This study describes the development and verification of BikeCOM: a cooperative smartphone application able to prevent accidents at intersections by warning both the driver and cyclist in case of an imminent threat. The BikeCOM application runs on Android smartphones and relies on bicycle-to-vehicle communication to exchange safety relevant information. Naturalistic cycling data from the BikeSAFE and BikeSAFER projects was used to identify the safety critical situation to be addressed. This safety critical situation was described with use cases to envision different application scenarios and derive technical and functional requirements. After the prototype implementation, a pilot test was performed to 1) test the application, 2) develop a data analysis tool, and 3) design the protocol for a larger experiment. Both a bicycle and a car were used in this larger experiment to recreate the safety critical situation in a controlled real-world scenario. Results from this experiment show that cooperative applications based on smartphones and connecting bicycles and cars are feasible and possibly desirable. However, present limitations on positioning and latency strongly limit their reliability. The BikeCOM application promoted smartphones from a distraction hazard to a distraction countermeasure; proposing that banning smartphone technology from traffic might, in the long-term, harm safety and suggesting that integration of safety applications to more traditional and distractive applications such as SMS writing, dialing, and mailing, may be an acceptable solution to limiting distraction from smartphones. (Author/publisher)
Abstract