A mobile solution for road accident data collection

Abstract

Road accidents are a major cause of injuries and death in developing countries. 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. This study focuses on improving accident data collection by using a Smartphone-based application. The application's aim is to improve data collection, while supporting mobility, ubiquity and accuracy. The name of the application is CrashData; it has been developed and tested in Kenya. Using the application, data are 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 other accident data sets. Location information recording is supported and depends entirely on Smartphone inbuilt GPS module and Google places API. 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.