Some pedestrians walk down the sidewalk as if in a dream, absorbed by their smartphone screens, and drivers themselves are wont to become engrossed in a GPS app or text and lose track of the road. One group is harnessing the distracting smartphones themselves to keep everyone out of danger.
“We’ve created a system that can estimate if a pedestrian and a car are going to have an accident using only the smart devices that people carry,” says Kaustubh Dhondge, a graduate student at University of Missouri, Kansas City. “Instead of using a special communication mechanism, we’ve achieved this communication over Wi-Fi for the first time.” Read more.