ConnectAide: crash detection for the golden hour

Almost half of road-accident deaths are preventable if care reaches the victim within the first hour, the “golden hour.” In India that works out to roughly 600,000 preventable deaths a year. The problem usually isn’t the hospital; it’s the gap between the crash and anyone knowing it happened.

ConnectAide is an in-vehicle crash-detection and alerting system. When it detects a crash, it automatically calls the nearest hospital and police station, so help can be dispatched in those first few minutes without a conscious passenger to make the call.

What made it work

It fit into the vehicle’s existing architecture instead of being a bolt-on gadget, and it was cheap enough to put in ordinary cars rather than only smart ones. The crash data it logs is also useful for road-safety analysis afterwards.

The team and the result

I built ConnectAide with Team Agile for the Swadeshi Microprocessor Challenge (2021). It reached the semi-finals, top 100 of 6,169 teams, and won a prize of ₹1,00,000.