David Jackson, MBA
South Africa’s CrashDetech app was designed to detect car accidents. The app utilizes a smartphone that will be used to detect impact. The app will detect the impact, call an agent to request emergency dispatch and even pinpoint your location.
The app is designed to reduce wait times following an accident.
Less wait times will save lives. Global Road Safety Partnership states that accidents kill a person every 30 seconds. Roughly 1.25 million people die on the road annually, or over 3,400 people per day. It’s estimated that 2 million people in the United States suffer injuries from accident collisions.
The issue of accident collisions and deaths is even worse in developing countries, which account for 90% of road fatalities. Some nations spend 5% of their GDP on car accidents. There have been over 100 nations pledging to reduce car accident deaths after the U.N. declared 2011 – 2020 the “Decade of Road Safety.”
Africa is among the countries with the highest road death rates in the world. Libya has 73 deaths per 100,000 people.
CrashDetech, founded in South Africa, detects sudden motion that is common with car crashes. G-force is also detected. The app will call for the nearest medical emergency team to be dispatched.
CrashDetech goes a step further, offering medical personnel in-depth information about you. The app will send out your personal medical information, such as blood type and any allergies you may have. Sending this information will reduce wait times as well as deaths.
WHO estimates that car accidents in South Africa claim 38 lives per day. WHO found that the speed that medical personnel respond to a crash and the effectiveness of the medical experts is the key difference between life and death.
Doctors suggest that CrashDetech may play a key role in saving lives. South Africa is known for drivers not wearing their seatbelts, which is a trend that is turning around. The app with the addition of wearing seat belts has been able to curb the amount of deadly accidents in South Africa.
The app has over 113 emergency medical providers in its database, and will use the phone’s location as a means of determining which emergency medical provider to dispatch. The technology will lead to faster responses from medical providers.
The app’s usage is on the rise, with over 3,000 subscribers in the first six months of the app’s existence. CrashDetech’s rising popularity has led to over 7,000 new people downloading the app per month.
The company that developed the app expects to have 500,000 subscribers within the next year. The figures are a result of the company signing a licensing agreement. Mobilium, a company that offers apps in the health sector, licensed the technology to provide it to its health applications and insurance providers.
The app is being promoted to large businesses as a form of an employee benefit. The app also logs every journey in a car and can be used for tax claims and work expenses. The developer is in discussions to bring the app across the world in the US, Guatemala, Zambia and Uganda.
