Here’s a pretty interesting technology story from Oki Electric. They’ve announced that they have succeeding in developing the world’s first ultra small DSRC (Dedicated Short Range Communication) wireless module designed for embedding into mobile phones. With this module, Oki successfully created what they call a “Safety Mobile Phone”.  The safety mobile phone uses the DSRC system to notify other vehicles in the area of your location and information. It also retrieves information about other DSRC equipped vehicles and informs you of their position relative to you – helping to keep you safe from vehicle-pedestrian accidents.

This entire safety project falls under Japan’s “New IT Reform Strategy” which calls for developing necessary technologies to help reduce the number of pedestrians killed in traffic accidents. One of the ways to utilize technology is to leverage the fact that nearly everyone in the country owns a mobile phone. The safety mobile phone prototype shows how such a technology could work in real life. Users carrying such a phone would create a DSRC wireless area (which stretches for several hundred meters in radius) with other vehicles equipped with DSRC. The phone would send out its location information at regular intervals within the area. When two locations become close, local information will constantly be exchanged – providing near real time information exchange. If there’s a high probability of an accident, a warning will be sent out to the user of the device. This means the driver of a car will be notified that a pedestrian is near and the pedestrian will be notified on their mobile phone that a car is really close to them.

Interesting stuff isn’t it? My only concern about such a technology would be setting the right thresholds – especially in high traffic environments where there are large volumes of pedestrians and car traffic. You won’t want your mobile phones constantly going off if you happen to be at a traffic stop with tons of cars literally a few feet from you. Soon you’d learn to ignore such warnings. Hopefully, this technology can be successfully deployed in Japan – and who knows – maybe we’ll see it in other countries around the world.

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