Design and Development of Smart Helmet to Avoid

2020 IEEE International Symposium on Sustainable Energy, Signal Processing and Cyber Security (iSSSC) | 978-1-7281-8880-5/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/iSSSC50941.2020.9358838

Road Hazards Using IoT

*

Sandhya.A.Kulkarni∗ , Sowmya C S∗ , Subhalakshmi P∗ , Tejashwini S A∗ , V R Sanusha∗ , Amitha S∗ and Vandana Jha∗

∗ Department of Computer Science and Engineering

K S School of Engineering and Management, Bengaluru, India

Email: [email protected]

Abstract—The life of a rider on two-wheeler can be saved from internet and capable of collecting and sharing data. IoT adds
road accident with standard protection and safety features. The digital intelligence to devices which enables those devices to
government has introduced lot of safety rules and instructions intercommunicate with each other without human intervention.
to be practiced while driving, but many of them seldom to obey
the rules. The primary objective of this work is to develop smart IoT is efficaciously merging of digital world with physical
helmet using internet of things, which improves safety of two world [1]. In the Internet of Things, all the devices are con-
wheeler riders. The proposed smart helmet system is equipped nected to the internet can be categorized as: In first category,
with advanced alcohol sensing, potholes, speed breakers and fall it includes the devices which can be connected to internet, for
detection modules. The circuit is constructed in such a way that ex temperature sensors, air quality sensors etc. These devices
the bikes ignition is avoided, not letting the rider to ride bike, if
the rider has consumed alcohol exceeding the limit. The proposed allow the users to automatically gather information from the
system is capable of detecting presence of alcohol concentration devices and can take smart decisions based on the information
from 0.05 mg/l to 10 mg/l by using MQ3 alcohol sensor, able to collected. In second category it includes those devices which
identify potholes and humps within range of 2cm-400cm.Global are capable of collecting information and send it, but also
System for Mobile Communication(GSM) and Global Positioning receive information and take necessary action on it. The last
System(GPS) are used to send the information to the registered
number, if the biker meets with accident. category includes devices which are able to collect, receive act
Index Terms—Smart Helmet, IoT, GSM, Alcohol sensors, on it. IoT consists of intelligent machines that can interrelate
Ultrasonic sensors, GPS. and can exchange information, with other devices, entity, and
domain.
I. INTRODUCTION The main intent of this paper is:
The past few years have shown an exponential rise in the • To develop a prototype that provides safety to motorcycle

total number of people travelling with own vehicles. The riders or any two wheeler riders.
numbers of vehicles have also increased statistically, also • To design a model that reduces the road accidents due to

led to an increase in the count of road accidents as well. drink and drive.
Road accidents in India have increased every year, due to no • To design system that alerts the family members/friends

proper driving knowledge, rash driving, drink and drive, not by giving information about the accidents.
following the traffic rules etc. According to global status report • To design system that promotes wearing of helmet that

on road safety 2018, it says annual road traffic deaths have can decrease traumatism from the impact and may save
reached 1.35 million. The ratio is disproportionately divided a life.
as pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists, in particular those The contents of the paper are as follows, section II ex-
living in developing countries. The other factors which have plains about related work, section III interpret about proposed
contributes for increase in total number of road accidents algorithm, section IV explain about hardware and software
include rapid growth in population, socio economic devel- components used in development of smart helmet, section V
opment, industrialization and motorization. Sometimes the discuss about experimental results, section VI explains about
injured person die due to unavailability of medical treatment concluding remarks and future enhancement.
on time, delayed arrival of ambulance, unavailability of person
II. RELATED WORK
at place of accident to give information to the ambulance.
The main objective of this proposed work is to develop a In the past, there exists some research works for safety of
smart helmet using IoT. Internet of things (IoT) is amalga- the bike riders.
mation several heterogeneous devices through a network or Agarwal et.al [2] has proposed an approach which ensures
that bike wont start until the rider wears the helmet, thereby
978-1-7281-8880-5/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE ensuring the safety of biker. The proposed model consist a RF

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transmitter and a RF receiver, if the user does not wears the detects and notifies potholes and humps on roads to the riders.
helmet the bike ignition will be disabled, as user wear helmet The proposed system consists of three modules namely - server
a RF signal diverge from transmitter and once these RF signal module, mobile application module and the micro controller
is perceived by the receiver placed in the ignition switch of module. Micro controller module sends the data which is
the bike, bike will get start. This approach that does not check been received by server module for further processing. The
for drunk and drive condition. processed data is cached in the database.
Kulkarni et.al [3] have designed and developed an auto- Chandran et.al [8] have proposed a Konnect an IoT based
mated wireless smart helmet application. The main aim of the application that provides a cost effective accident detection and
proposed work is it enhances the survival rate of the riders notification system. The proposed system consists of sensors,
by providing timely support. The proposed system consists Wi-Fi enabled processor, and cloud based notification system.
of three modules slave module, server module and receiver If any accident occurs the locality of the rider is obtained by
module. The slave module consists of temperature, vibration, utilizing global positioning system and by utilizing a cloud
heart rate sensors which send the data to master unit receives services these details are sent to the registered numbers.
the data and is processed to determined whether accident Jesudoss et.al [9] has proposed a smart helmet system to
has occurred or not. The communication between different detect the alcoholic substance present in the raiders breadth
modules is done through ZigBee module. If accident occurs and to avoid the accident. The rider is wearing helmet or not
the recipient collects the information about accident location is identified by using IR sensors and gas sensors are used to
in the form of latitude and longitude values. identify the alcoholic substance in the riders breath. If any one
Vijayan et.al [4] has proposed a smart helmet system, which of the specified constraints is satisfied then the rider will not
automatically checks whether the user is wearing a helmet able to start the vehicle. The proposed system is also useful at
or not, it also checks whether the user has non- alcoholic a time when any accident happens, to recognize the motorbike
breath while driving. If any one of the condition fails bike condition and to send the information regarding accident like
will not start. The proposed system consists of transmitter at location of the accident place to the nearby hospital using
helmet and receiver is placed at the bike. If the helmet is GPS.
wore properly then switch is in closed position and alcohol Wong et.al [10] has developed a smart helmet system
sensor detects whether driver has non alcoholic breath, if both which is integrated with Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU)
condition are satisfied then bike ignition will be enabled. This sensor to analyze the behavior of rider, like head moment
approach does not facilitate to provide information to friends and all. The feature extraction method is used to analyze the
in case if driver meets with accident. head moment and the problem formulated by using machine
Muthiah et.al [5] has proposed a novel approach of devel- learning techniques. The overall experiment result shown in
oping an intelligent smart helmet which automatically turns the proposed system was useful to conclude that gyroscope
headlamp on/off according to facial movements of the riders. sensor data is more accurate than accelerometer sensor which
This helmet contains an Arduino board, RF transmitter, 3- is used to identify the head moment.
axis accelerometer, buzzer, and a portable battery to power Rao et.al [11] has developed an idea of smart helmet,
the circuit. Accelerometer senses the direction of riders head it is provided with 2 different features. These two features
movement, if these values fall within range then switches are considered has two constraints that are: One is to check
in RF transmitter is made high by Arduino board, then this whether the rider is worn helmet or not, another is to know
signal will be received by the RF receiver and finally direction the rider is alcoholic or not. If mentioned two constraints are
of headlamp will be controlled by the servo motor, all the detected then ignition gets OFF. The rider will not able to ride
above process takes place only if helmet is buckled properly. the vehicle and LCD is used for displaying the conditions of
Additionally the system is also equipped with buzzer which smart helmet. The system also provided accident prevention
goes on if rider goes asleep. facility. Using mercury switch accident detection process is
Preetham et.al [6] have developed and implemented smart done and GPS and GSM are used to communicate with contact
helmet which is capable of detecting whether the rider has person about accident.
wore helmet or not, whether the rider have consumed the
alcohol or not, and face recognition unit to authorize the owner III. PROPOSED SYSTEM
of bike. If any one of the above conditions is violated bike The proposed work is named as Smart Helmet based on IoT,
wont start up. The working of the smart helmet can be studied is an avaricious application that impart safety of the bike riders
under two modules helmet module and bike module. The hel- against road accidents. Smart helmet aims to decrease the rate
met module detects the presence of alcohol concentration, also of road accidents. It has ability to detect alcohol consumption
capable of detecting whether the rider is wearing the helmet. by the biker. It uses GSM technology and MEMS to inform
The second module of the work does the face recognition of the family members in case of accidents. It has the ability to
the authorized owner by using Viola-Jones algorithm is used identify the pot holes and humps and it also equipped with
along with SVM (support vector machine) for classification. torch, which will be on if there is no light.
Madli et.al [7] has proposed a cost effective approach to en- The smart helmet model consists of following components
sure the safety of riders. The proposed approach automatically - micro controller, IR sensor, ultrasonic sensor, alcohol sensor,

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 work it is used as a breath analyzer which detects the alcohol
presence in the breath of the rider. If the sensor discovers
the availability of alcohol then bike will not start. The sensor
could be used to detect presence of alcohol with different
concentrations. Because of low cost and alcohol can be used
for the different applications.
C. ULTRASONIC SENSOR
Ultrasonic sensors use ultra sonic sound waves to measure
the distance to an object. It is highly reliable sensor which is
not affected by light, air, smoke, dust. In this work it used to
spot the potholes and humps and notification will be sent to
user if the data acquired by the sensor exceed the sampling
Fig. 1. System Architecture of Smart Helmet. value.
D. GLOBAL SYSTEM FOR MOBILE COMMUNICATION
accelerometer, power supply, GSM, GPS, zigbee, buzzer, DC European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI)
motor, LCD power supply as shown in Fig. 1. The detailed developed a standard called Global system for mobile com-
flow chart of the smart helmet is shown in Fig. 2 munication (GSM), it describe the protocols for second-
generation (2G) digital cellular networks used by mobile
devices such as mobile phones and tablets. To communicate
with GSM you need to know the AT commands. By sending
these commands to GSM module it will work according. Based
on the GSM working bandwidth you need to configure the
values in MCU (Micro controller).
E. ACCELEROMETER
In this work, Micro Electro Mechanical System (MEMS)
accelerometer is used for vibration measurement without a
fixed reference. When a vehicle meets with an accident im-
mediately accelerometer will detect the signal and sends it to
8051 micro controller.
F. GLOBAL POSITIONING SYSTEM
Global Positioning System or GPS is one of the components
of Global satellite navigation system .The main feature of GPS
is providing the information about time and location to the
Fig. 2. Flowchart of Smart Helmet.
user in all climate conditions. In this work, when accident
takes place then GSM module sends location using GPS to
IV. HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE COMPONENTS registered phone numbers.
USED IN SMART HELMET G. ZIGBEE
The following section discuss about the hardware and ZigBee is a robust, light weight wireless networking pro-
software components used in development of Smart Helmet. tocol which is a low data rate, energy efficient, secure and
A. 8051 MICRO CONTROLLER stable protocol. It has same benefits as Wi-Fi system wireless
protocol for personal area networking. It is specially developed
8051 micro controller is a CISC based micro controller.
for the system that follow IEEE 802.15.4 standard.
It consists of 8 bit ALU, registers, program counter, stack
pointer, interrupt circuit and clock circuit. It is capable of H. DC MOTOR
fetching the instructions and executes them. It is build with DC motor is an electrical device that transforms electrical
4 kb ROM and 128 bytes RAM. Some of the applications power into mechanical power. It is appropriate for high and
of micro controllers are robotics, IoT, temperature and light low power drives and easy maintenance.
sensing devices, process control devices.
I. POWER SUPPLY
B. ALOCHOL SENSOR A power supply is an electrical equipment that supplies
The MQ-3 alcohol sensor is used in this work since it electric power to an electrical devices. The main functionality
sensitive to gases and alcohol and it is able to detect existence of the power supply is to transform electric from a source to
of alcohol gases concentration at 0.05 mg/L to 10 mg/L. In this the accurate voltage current and frequency to power the load.

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J. KIEL U
Keil compiler is a software development environment used
for Arm, CortexM based micro controller devices. It includes
all the components that are needed to create, edit, and debug
any embedded application.
K. PROLOAD
PROLOAD stands for program load. Proload is a software
which accepts the hex code generated by KIEL U. The
compiled hex code will be dumped in to the micro controller
placed in programmer kit this will be done by the PROLOAD
software. The main advantage of using PROLOAD is it is user
friendly.
L. PROTUES
Proteus is circuit simulation application. The interaction
between software running micro controller and any digital or
analog electrical component connected to it is done by using
protues. Fig. 4. MQ-3 Sensor.

M. PCB DESIGN
It is one of the most important equipment in electronic cir-
MQ3- alcohol sensor, as shown in Fig. 4, is a low-effective
cuits. It offers quick functioning, access, control and provides
semiconductor sensor which can identify the presence of
precise results. The board is usually made up of glass or fiber.
alcohol gases at concentrations from 0.05 mg/L to 10 mg/L.
After identifying the position of the electronic components the
It is capable of detecting alcohol concentration in your breath.
holes are drilled on the board, then components are placed in
The bike ignition will be disabled if alcohol is consumed else
the drilled holes and soldered so that components and copper
bike ignition will be enabled.
tracks together forms a circuit.
For identification of potholes and humps ultrasonic sensors
V. EXPERIMENT AND RESULT are used which are capable of detecting the pothole. Ultrasonic
In smart helmet, the sensor connector which is 8051 mi- sensor emits ultrasonic waves of frequency greater than 20
crocontroller sends a query to sensor catalogue which in turn KHz, and receiver intercepts the waves reflected by the ob-
sends sensor specification to micro controller, and then the stacle. It determines the distance to target by measuring time
sensor reads the data from the micro controller with the help of lapses between the sending and receiving of the ultrasonic
data accumulator. The data accumulator transforms the data in pulse, notifies user about pothole or hump detected on LCD
binary representation to the sensors within few seconds, after display as shown in Fig.5. and Fig. 6 inform rider with a
the data is analyzed the sensor performs the task requested. warning sound from the buzzer.
The complete connectivity of the LCD module with the micro The smart helmet is also equipped with light dependent
controller is as shown in Fig. 3. resistor (LDR), which is used to detect the presence or absence
of light. LDR permits a lower voltage to go through it (high
resistance) during dark, and it allows higher voltages to pass
(low resistance) when there is a focus of light. The Arduino
reads the voltage from the LDR, which converts read analog
voltage (from 0-5V) to digital value (0-1023), these digital
values are used to turn on the relay which in turn switches
torch to on state, when the light intensity is low.
When the helmet hits the ground, accelerometer will dis-
tinguish the signal and sends it to 8051 micro controller. The
micro controller identifies the accident event and will send
a message containing data about the accident and its GSM
and GPS modules. The GPS coordinates along with time and
information is sent to the family members and the server via
GSM. The complete prototype of smart helmet is as shown in
Fig. 7.
Fig. 3. LCD module Displaying Smart Helmet Connectivity which Displays Table I shows the approximate cost incurred for developing
Various Instructions. the prototype of the smart helmet.

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 Fig. 7. Smart Helmet Prototype.

TABLE I
A PPROXIMATE C OST INCURRED FOR DEVELOPING S MART H ELMET.

Component Name Cost in Rupees

Helmet 2000 (Rupees)
8051 micro controller 110 (Rupees)
Sensors 155 (Rupees)
Jumper Cables 60 (Rupees)
USB Cable 35 (Rupees)
PCB board 500 (Rupees)
DCmotor & Power 500 (Rupees)
supply
Fig. 5. Ultrasonic Sensor Detecting Pothole. Miscellaneous 600 (Rupees)
Total 3960 (Rupees)

VI. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

ENCHNACEMENT
IoT based smart helmet is a cost effective approach which
can be employed for safety of the bike riders. Smart helmet
uses minimal hardware and software resources which are easy
to install and use. Smart helmet provides solution to many
problems,which occur due to violation of traffic rules. The
proposed work aims at minimizing the frequency of head
injuries that occur during the road accident. It also reduces
the number of accidents that occur due to drink and drive case
since bike ignition is avoided without any manual intervention,
if the biker has consumed the alcohol. The smart helmet gives
information about speed breakers and pothole to rider using
ultrasonic sensors, which helps in avoiding accidents. In case
if rider meets with an accident, the smart helmet ensures to
provide the location the rider to the predefined phone numbers
through GSM and MEMS technology. The future enhancement
can be done by using circuit that can be powered by solar
energy so that it uses green energy and does no harm to
environment. This intelligent system can be manufactured in
a compact size so that it is globally accepted.

R EFERENCES
Fig. 6. Ultrasonic Sensor Detecting Hump.
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