Automatic Collision Notification Field Test Summary

The Oct 2001 issue of Annals of Emergency Medicine pg 453-455 has 2 short notes

Notes by Henry Lahore 10/14/01

They reference a paper which found that only 39% of rural EMS calls in Missouri were made within 5 minutes of a collision and that 60% of all fatal crashes in that state occurred on rural roadways.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration sponsored an Automatic Collision Notification field test from 1995 to 2000 in New York on 800 vehicles. 

70 crashes occurred during the test.

22 of the crashes had force thresholds high enough to automatically notify the PSAPs [public safety answering points]. 

However, 4 of the crashes were ‘false-negatives’ = were detected but the PSAP did not receive any message. “The explanations for the ‘false-negatives’ included poor cellular coverage, disconnected modems, battery failure, and damage to the cellular equipment in the crash.  The poor cellular coverage is particularly troublesome because the ACNs are proposed as a rural solution yet rural areas have the poorest cellular coverage”

The average notification time for the ACN for the signals which did go through was 44 seconds, vs. a New York state average of 7 minutes.

Note: Even the OnStar system with 1,000,000 subscribers is limited by cell-phone communication