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MQTT based vehicle accident detection and alert system

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MQTT Based Vehicle Accident Detection and Alert
System
Ravi K Kodali and Shubhi Sahu
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering
National Institute of Technology, Warangal,
WARANGAL-506004, India
Email: ravikkodali@gmail.com

Abstract—Now-a-days as we open the newspaper, we find II. L ITERATURE S URVEY

atleast one news of a road accident. With vehicles becoming
increasingly affordable, there has been a surge in the number
of vehicles on roads on an average all over the world. Accidents
bring devastation upon victims, causing loss of precious time
and money. It has been established, after extensive research,
that a majority of accidents become fatalities because of lack
of communication to the concerned medical authorities and the
consequent lack of immediate medical support. This application
helps sense the possible occurence of an accident on the road,
with the help of sensors attached to the vehicle. This occurence
will be immediately communicated to the concerned people so
that further action can be taken without any further ado.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Vehicular accidents on the road have become a commonality
due to a host of reasons, some of them including rapid in-
crease in number of vehicles, growing number of irresponsible
drivers, lack of proper driving skill. Although many road
accidents do not cause immediate death to the victims, it is
the lack of proper medical assistance immediately after the
accident that take lives of many people. Road accidents have
resulted, in the past one year, in more than a million deaths
worldwide, a few of them which could have been prevented if
the information had been relayed to the concerned authorities
on time.
Our proposed system implements a combination of low-power
sensors, a cost-effective microcontroller and a powerful IoT
platform to create an application that does not depend on
humans to function. This aspect makes it fast and more
reliable. The core of this application is a NodeMCU, a very
economic and extremely popular Wi-Fi based microcontroller
which takes in readings from an accelerometer sensor and
an ultrasonic sensor. The accelerometer sensor senses any
abnormal tilt in the vehicle and the ultrasonic sensor senses the
distance between the vehicle and another. With a combination
of the data from these sensors, the system detects an accident
and using the lighweight MQTT protocol for communication,
uploads the data onto the powerful Losant IoT platform. Then
Losant receives the data and sends mails to the concerned
people about the accident, thus making it an efficient and
fast communication system without the need for any human
interference.
A considerable amount of work has already gone into
developing solutions for vehicle accident and detection
systems all over the world.
This paper [1] aims to design a system where the accident is
being detected by the help of airbags or any shock detecting
mechanism activating the shock sensors, and a HTTP request
is sent through a pre-installed mobile application on the
user’s smartphone, including the geographical location. Based
on the location, the system queries a database and alerts the
concerned authorities.
This paper [2] makes use of an accelerometer sensor and
a heartbeat sensor. The accelerometer is used to detect if a
vehicle has falled down and then the heartbeat sensor is used
to detect if any abnormality in the heartbeat of the driver
has occured. This helps indicate the occurence of an accident
and the data is sent to the smartphone via Bluetooth. The
smartphone then on, is in charge of searching for the nearest
medical center and requesting for help.
This paper [3] also makes use of an accelerometer sensor to
detect the occurence of an accident. When the accelerometer
values go beyond the range set for a safe threshold, the
microcontroller sends the information using HTTP PUSH
actions attaching the location obtained from a GPS module.
Paper [4] makes use of a pressure sensor along with an
accelerometer to receive data, and coupled with the speed of
the vehicle obtained from the GPS readings, uses algorithms
to detect if an accident has occured.
III. D ESIGN AND I MPLEMENTATION
Fig. 1. Block Diagram

978-1-5386-1144-9$31.00 2017
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 The overview architecture of the proposed system is shown
Fig. 1. In this system nodemcu board which acts like a client
publishes the sensor data into the Losant Message Broker
using the MQTT protocol on to the topic Losant/DEVICE
ID/state. In order to understand the messages of losant, a
defined json-based payload must be followed. The published
data will automatically store in the losant and make it available
in visualization tool of losant platform. In order to subscribe
the stored data from the losant MQTT broker the client must
subscribe to the commands that are initiated using losant
workflow on to the topic Losant/DEVICE ID/commands.
A. NodeMCU
Fig. 2. NodeMCU
NodeMCU is an open source IoT platform. Its firmware runs
on the Wi-Fi SoC of ESP8266 and the hardware is designed
based on the ESP12 module. It is quite compact and also
affordable, making it one of the most popular choices for
many people working on IoT applications. With a RAM of
128kB and a storage space of 4MB, it is quite light on memory
and power consumption. It has one analog and eight digital
GPIOs, thus making it quite convenient to run a variety of
different applications integrating sensors and actuators with it.
It is very comfortable to work with, as it is a quite versatile
device and also there is a lot of documentation available on it
on the Internet. Owing to its advantages with respect to size,
memory and power consumption, it has become one of the
most popular microcontrollers in the IoT scenario.
B. Sensors
Fig. 3. Accelerometer
1) ADXL335 Accelerometer: The ADXL335 is a small
3-axis accelerometer with the ability to sense tilts in three
dimensions. Its sensitivity in acceleration extends upto 3 g. It
can sense the static acceleration if gravity is to be measured.
It can also sense dynamic acceleration resulting from any kind
of movement.
International Conference on Applied and Theoretical Computing and Communication Technology
Fig. 4. Ultrasonic Sensor
2) Ultrasonic Sensor: An ultrasonic sensor sends out an
ultransonic pulse of a prefixed frequency. If there is an obstacle
in the path of the pulse, the waves gets reflected back and are
again imposed on the receiver of the sensor. Depending on the
time taken for the waves to reach back to the sensor, the range
of the obstacle is calculated.
C. Actuators
Fig. 5. Buzzer
1) Buzzer: The piezo-electronic buzzer here is an audio
device of sorts, providing a sound of a particular tone when
electricity is passed through it. There are a variety of buzzers
depending on factors such as frequency, decibel level and type
of buzzer.
Fig. 6. OLED Display
2) OLED Display: The SSD1306 OLED Display module
is a 128x64 single-chip CMOS OLED Driver with controller
for organic light emitting dot matrix graphic display system.
It consists of 128 segments and 64 commons.it has a 256-step
brightness control and communication with any general MCU
can be done through Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) or I2C
(Inter-Integrated Circuit). It operates at a voltage of 1.65-3.3V.
D. Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT)
Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is a light
weight transport protocol that efficiently uses the network
bandwidth with a 2 byte fixed header . MQTT works on TCP
and assures the delivery of messages from node to the server.
Being a message oriented information exchange protocol,
MQTT is better suited at IoT applications than any RESTful
services because MQTT has a very lightweight requirements
on memory, consequently leading to lower transmit power.
This is a huge advantage as comared to REST as they
have large header sizes and demand more power, which is a
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problem where nodes in an IoT infrastructure need to conserve
their energy to as much an extent as possible. MQTT is a
publish/subscribe based protocol involving clients and brokers.
Clients can be publishers or subscribers. When a publisher
publishes data, the broker receives the information. The broker
is in charge of receiving subscription requests from subscribers
and sending the published information from the publishers to
the subscribers.
Fig. 7. MQTT Operation
E. Losant IoT Platform
Losant is an easy-to-use and powerful enterprise IoT plat-
form designed to help you quickly and securely build com-
plex connected solutions. Losant uses open communication
standards like REST and MQTT to provide connectivity
from one to millions of devices. Losant provides powerful
data collection, aggregation, and visualization features to help
understand and quantify vast amounts of sensor data.
Connecting to LOSANT:
Connecting with Losant platform is very easy and it took few
steps which are as follows:
• Create an Application: An application is created by some
meaningful name which contains all the devices and
workflow that makes us convenient to connect us with
the real world.
• Add a Device : In Losant a device is a single thing or
widget. It could be anything from a simple car, smart
devices, thermostat to any kind of custom gadgets.
• Create a Workflow: Complex interactions between our
devices and 3rd party system can be easily build by
simply using drag and drop workflow editor. Its output
can also be used to track data by storing it in virtual
device.
• Create a Dashboard: Losant platform provide a flexible
and powerful way to visualize and analyze the data we
stored in our device. This dashboard generator is used to
display the information relevant to our specific connected
solutions.
188 International Conference on Applied and Theoretical Computing and Communication Technology
IV. H ARDWARE R EALIZATION
Fig. 8. Circuit
In the circuit connection, we have used NodeMCU v1,
ADXL335 Accelerometer, Ultrasonic sensor, buzzer, OLED
128*64,male to male jumper wires, breadboard,micro USB
cable. NodeMCU is powered by portable batteries like power
bank through micro USB cable. Accelerometer is connected to
one of the I/O terminal (A0) of NodeMCU and given a 3.3volts
power supply. Ultrasonic sensor is connected to I/O 12 and
13 of the board and given 3.3volts power supply. Buzzer is
connected to D0 and D1 terminal of the NodeMCU. OLED is
also connected to the digital pins D6 and D7 of the NodeMCU.
V. S OFTWARE R EALIZATION
For all Losant IoT developer kits an environmental setup
must be done before flashing the firmware into the device.
An USB driver is installed in the Arduino IDE. Few libraries
require to be installed. The required libraries are PubSub-
Client, ArduinoJson and Losant Arduino MQTT Client. In
the kit source code few things need to be modified such as
wifi SSID, wifi pass, Losant Device ID, Losant access Key,
Losant access secret. Now upload the firmware to the device
and after every 2 seconds the firmware is publishing the state
of accelerometer and ultrasonic value to the losant. If distance
by ultrasonic sensor is greater than 50 buzzer gets HIGH and
(or) if accelerometer reading increases 40(optimized value) it
sends an alert through EMAIL
VI. T ESTIND AND R ESULTS
In Fig. 9, we see the accelerometer and ultrasonic sesnsors
values on the Losant Dashboard. These will be periodically
updated. The green colour of the dials are set to indicate that
there has been no abnormal sensor readings and that the driver
is safe with no accident occuring.
Fig. 9.
 In Fig. 10, we see that the accelerometer is reporting a tilt
value which has been calibrated to be decided that it is not
safe. This indicates that an accident has occured that caused
the vehicle to tilt out of the safe zone.
Fig. 10.
In Fig. 11, we see the ultrasonic sensor reporting an obstacle
too close to the vehicle. At typical speeds, seeing on the
Losant dashboard such a small distance as a measure of a
few centimeters means that there has been a collision on the
road with another vehicle.
Fig. 11.
Fig. 12 shows the Losant Workflow with which a series of
instructions have been defined so that whenever any of the
two aforementioned cases occur, the data received by Losant
will trigger this workflow and send an email to the addresses
which are specified in advance.
Fig. 12.
In Fig. 13 we see an email being received by the concerned
people whenever the sensor readings go into the danger zone,
so that immediate action can be taken.
International Conference on Applied and Theoretical Computing and Communication Technology
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Fig. 13.
VII. C ONCLUSION
In a nutshell, this project helps us create an IoT system
wherein the application can detect the possibility of occurence
of an accident and accordingly alert the driver and the con-
cerned people.
As an extension, the future scope includes location of accident
being informed to the desired persons such as nearest hospital,
police and owner of vehicle through sms sent containing co-
ordinates obtained from GPS along with time of accident and
vehicle number.
Also a camera can be located inside vehicle that will transmit
real time video to see current situation of passengers inside
vehicle.
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