oa Wearable V2X solution for Children and Vulnerable Road Users Safety on the Road

According to Energy Technology Perspectives 2014, there are approximately 900 million light duty vehicles (not counting two- and three-wheelers) today, and that number will be doubled by 2050 to reach 2 billion. Such a considerable increase will bring-in further challenges for road safety and traffic efficiency. Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for children and young adults in the United States, with an annual death toll of 33,000 and over 2.3 million people injured. Those figures are representative of the challenge not only in the US but also in other regions including Qatar and the golf region. Vehicle to Vehicle and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2X) communication technology, which is heading our roads in few years, is seen as a great solution to reduce number of accidents on the road, and it is considered as an enabler of next generation of road safety and Intelligent Transport System (ITS). V2X communication is not limited to vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure, it is also meant to be used for vehicle-to-bicycle and even vehicle-to-pedestrian communication. Indeed, by enabling real-time and fast communication between vehicles and vulnerable road users such as bicycles and road users, we may make the road much safer for those vulnerable road users. This is one of the use cases we would like to enable and test in the Qatar V2X Field Operational Field (Qatar V2X FOT) which is supported and funded by Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF). Enabling vulnerable road-users such as bicycles and pedestrians with V2X capabilities has many challenges. The main challenge is the energy consumption, as V2X operates in 5.9GHz radio band, which consumes relatively high energy. Therefore, to operate V2X on those vulnerable users, especially the pedestrian, the user needs to hold a battery which requires to be regularly recharged. We came out with a solution to this problem, which reduces the energy consumption of the V2X device to a level it can operate a small battery suitable to be a wearable device. This poster will expose the challenges when using V2X on vulnerable road users, especially pedestrians, and it will present solution and the related prototype that is developed and tested within the NPRP project. The solution and prototype presented in this poster are the outcomes of the research project NPRP 8-2459-1-482 which is supported and funded by QNRF.