PRESENT-DAY PATENT- A PREVIEW

Preventing Drowsy Driving Accidents…

The growing number of vehicles per house, although easing up transportation, also has a bitter side- The Roadside Accidents. Wrong-side driving, drunk driving, distracted driving, speedy driving and not well-trained driving might be cited as few causes. However, there is another factor: ‘The driving by a restless sleepy driver’. Do you know that drowsy driving takes more than 1500 lives per year across the globe with more than 70000 injuries, as per the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration? Though 15 minutes of break between 3 hours of driving can reduce drowsy driving crashes, more often people prefer to reach their destination fast than taking a nap or break, blindly forgetting that a lost life can never return. Hence, obviously accidents are more frequent. Hence, it is desirable to modernize the vehicles to make the driver stay awake while driving and for preventing accidents and huge losses to the accident victim. A recent invention supports this notion by waking up the drowsy driver, when he/ she is very close to the road safety barrier. But how? With the installation of microstrip antennas along the road safety barrier and the vehicle, establishing a communication between the two. The procedure assumes that the driver is sleeping and his vehicle is heading towards a road safety barrier. The transmitted signal from the microstrip antenna of road safety barrier is received by a same antenna kind being installed at the vehicle. The received signal then gets amplified and passed on to a microcontroller at the steering wheel, which actuates two vibration motors that are mounted in the steering wheel itself based on a threshold, alerting the driver to stay awake with the vibrations. It is more admirable, as the same method can minimize vehicle-vehicle collisions. In this case, the microstrip antennas are installed in all vehicles to enable communication between them and alert the drivers using vibrations from vibration motors at steering wheels. It is quite normal that all the causes for roadside accidents result in horrible events and losses. So, it is in the hands of the future inventors to come up with new inventions that ensure transportation safety…

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