This mobile phone could save your life

Stuart Corner
Monday, 28 May 2007 11:29

Business IT - Technology

Japanese manufacturer OKI has developed a cellphone that it says could save its owner from being hit by a moving vehicle: by warning driver and pedestrian of the impending collision.

Oki has succeeded in embedding a Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) transceiver in a cellphone. DSRC is radio communications standard developed fro the automotive industry whose primary use today is electronic toll collections. However many other users are envisaged for DSRC, including collision avoidance systems.

Oki says it has completed trial production of the world’s first 'Safety Mobile Phone' that will notify nearby DSRC equipped vehicles of its location and also retrieve the location of such vehicles, thus making it possible to reduce the occurrence of vehicle-pedestrian accidents by warning both driver and pedestrian of an impending collision.

The location information of both the phone and the vehicle would derived from global positioning satellites (GPS). According to Oki, "Pedestrians with this device can create a DSRC wireless area (within a several hundred meters radius) with vehicles equipped with inter-vehicle communication equipment. The device sends out its location information at a regular time interval within the area. When the two locations become close and when the received power from each device goes over the specified value, location information will constantly be exchanged. In addition, when there is a high possibility of a traffic accident based on the location information, it will warn the users beforehand...Pedestrians will be warned through the vibration function on their mobile phones, and drivers will be informed through voice guidance function on the inter-vehicle communication equipment, helping avoid danger for both drivers and pedestrians."

OKI says it will work to lower the power consumption, achieve smaller sized DSRC wireless modules, and improve the user interface. OKI will also make efforts to integrate 3G mobile phones, PHS, and wireless LAN functions into a single mobile handset as part of a large-scale public-private experiment to be conducted in Japan. OKI also plans to achieve compatibility with IEEE802.11p, the DSRC international standard.