SteerSafe | Road Security App

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In cognizance of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals for 2020, we created the project of SteerSafe in order to create an intervention for tackling the problem of road safety in India.

By detailed analysis of our research findings and study of existing solutions, we brainstormed some solutions that addressed the issue in a specific nature.

First, we set some parameters we built the solutions upon. Some of these were:

Interactiveness: The solution should be interesting and interactive. In the survey and competitive analysis, we found that although some solutions to road safety exist, NO one uses them. We identified this is because they are quite boring and monotonous to use.

Ease of use: The solutions should be easy to use otherwise no one will always take the effort to use it.

Coverage: Whether the solution covers various different and crucial aspects of road menace.

Effectiveness: The solution should be effective in solving the problem.

Keeping these parameters in mind, 3 of the solutions we came up with are:

Awareness App for road safety: We realized that although a majority of people know about road safety, they hardly follow these safe practices. Thus in order to educate them, we proposed an app which contains information about general road safety, security laws and a daily notification on their phone to remind them to “stay safe”. We could also have some quiz and trivia section in the app. But we felt that there was a lack of an intriguing factor for the users in this app.

Drunk Test: About 75% of cases of road accidents were attributed to drunk driving. So, to address the issue of drunk driving, we proposed an application which created a test which a user would have to take and then which would determine if a user is safe to drive or not. If the user is drunk and fails the test, it would automatically book an Uber for the user and send a notification to the relatives/friends about this. But this posed a problem of how we would enforce the user to take the test and was a very specific issue app.

On the go Road Safety: We agreed that the best way to ensure road safety is to build an app which interacts with the user when he is actually driving. This idea is of a different nature as compared to the previous two ideas. We can address a wide range of areas in this app based solution. It can track the speed of a vehicle and sends an alert if we go beyond the speed limit on that particular road and give Alerts when driving in a recognized accident-prone area. Also, it sends an automated message to emergency service/nearest hospital and emergency contacts in case of an accident for prompt addressal of the accident.

We together came up to the conclusion that this was the best-suited solution due to its interactive nature, effectiveness, flexibility, and direct impact on the problem.