Dubai: A gadget that can instantly notify police of an accident location and time has won an Abu Dhabi engineering graduate a trip of a lifetime to the Netherlands.
Pakistani Asad Ali, 22, beat more than 50 other designs at the ‘Spirit of Innovation’, a UAE student competition earlier this month, to take home a month’s paid internship at the Philips headquarter in Amsterdam.
The device, which he has chosen to call ASAD or Automated Smart Accident Detection, is based on the concept of an airbag deployment system and will be tuned to detect instant changes in acceleration, rotation and an impact force on a vehicle before promptly sending out automatic messages to emergency contacts, detailing location and time of the accident.
“The idea is that as soon as the airbag is deployed during a major accident, the authorities will immediately be notified to prevent further car congestion as well as allow the passengers to be escorted to the hospital in a timely fashion, all using a similar sensor detection system,” Ali, who graduated in general engineering and mathematics from New York University, Abu Dhabi earlier this summer told XPRESS just after winning the award at a joint ceremony by Phillips and the Dubai Economic Council held here last week.
Simple design
“The design will be very simple. Instead of only using the deceleration as indication, the force on the front, rear and side of the vehicle as well as the gyroscope and speed values will also be recorded and used as a measure to decide whether to send an alert or not.
The sensor values will be transferred through Bluetooth to an application installed on the driver’s smartphone. If the result of all sensor values exceeds the given threshold, the smartphone, through the backbone network (GSM), will immediately inform the emergency contact/public safety (response team) that an accident has occurred at a particular location,” explained the son of a former diplomat who moved to the capital as a student four years ago.
An indoor UV lamp emitting narrowband UVB light (medium wave, mostly absorbed by ozone layer) to help the fight Vitamin D deficiency amongst UAE residents won Manan Sharma, 20, the runner-up prize.
His batch mate, Sahil Shakir, also 20, won the second prize for coming up with a solar powered design that converts humidity in the air to drinking water. Both, from India and third year computer science students at BITS Pilani, Dubai, were awarded medals of excellence.
