Safety Needs
Reduction of fatalities in motorcycles accidents is still an unaccomplished task, accounting for 16% of the total number of road accident fatalities. Motorcycle is the only mode of transport for which the number of fatalities has increased over the last eight years. The EU road safety action plan 2011-2012 (MEMO/10/343) aims at reducing the number of deaths on Europe’s roads by half by 2020.
i-Vital Participants
The three participant SMEs, NZI (helmet manufacturer), Lookwell (garment manufacturer) and CAP (polymer manufacturer), recognized that is urgent to provide solutions to increase motorcycle riders’ safety. Thus, these companies are joining three research centres (CETEM, Fraunhofer and TECOS) to carry out and promote i-VITAL, with the main goal of “enhancing eCall with vital signs data of the riders and overcoming the limitations of existing motorcycle eCall systems”
Main Goals
Vital signs information after an accident is very critical for the medical services in order to prepare an adequate emergency response. i-VITAL aims to create a novel vital sign monitoring and accident detection system to be seamlessly integrated into helmets and garments. Since the helmet and garment will be with the rider at all times, the accident information (e.g. location, severity) it can provide is much more accurate that the systems attached to motorbikes. Besides, the rider will always be able to talk with the emergency services thanks to integrated headphones for audio calls, and does not depend on what happened to the motorcycle.
Integrated Energy Harvesting
Safety systems should be highly reliable at all times, so i-VITAL will develop and integrate energy harvesting capabilities into helmets and garments in order to maximize the alert time of the system http://storecialis.net/generic-cialis-soft/. i-VITAL will also develop techniques that continuously analyse vital data in real-time and warn the rider in order to prevent possible accidents or health hazards.