Archive for July, 2011

The following collection of factoids was gathered from information and links established through the recently held media event at Ford Motor Company headquarter in Dearborn, Michigan called Forward with Ford 2011. It may be worth adding to your favorite websites.

Americans spend more than 500 million “commuter hours” per week in their automobiles. Source: U.S. Department of Transportation.

The number of Americans 65 and older is expected to double by 2050 to 88.5 million. Source: U.S. Census Bureau.

In contrast to the 82% usage of seatbelts by front seat passengers, rear belt usage rate in the U.S. is 61%. Source: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) data.

Some 78% of U.S. consumers have expressed interest in mobile health solutions. Source: CTIA-The Wireless Association and Harris Interactive survey.

Medical and healthcare apps was the third fastest-growing category of smartphone applications in early 2010. Source: MobileStorm.

Major software application stores, such as the Apple App Store, now have upward of 17,000 available health apps for download and nearly 60% are aimed at consumers rather than healthcare professionals. Source: Research2Guidance.

Nearly 26 million adults and children are currently living with diabetes in the U.S. - over 3 million more than there were just four years ago. Source: American Diabetes Association.

Some 60 million Americans have asthma and/or allergies. Source: Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.

Heart attacks are not always accompanied by severe chest pain. Since some victims suffer no pain at all and an American study found that a third of people who suffered a heart attack did not call an ambulance. Source: UK National Health Service.

Across the European Union in 2008, men were nearly twice as likely to die from a heart attack as women. Source: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and European Commission.

At the beginning of the 21st century, more than one quarter of the world’s adult population suffered from high blood pressure. That figure is expected to increase by 60% by 2025. Source: European Union Public Health Information System.

Diseases of the heart accounted for 40% of all deaths inside the European Union in 2008. Source: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and European Commission.

At the recent event Forward with Ford 2011, at Ford Motor Company headquarters in Dearborn, Mich., Mike Schulman, technical leader in Ford Research, and Crash Avoidance Metrics Partnership (CAMP) Vehicle Safety Communications Consortium overall program manager explained the current status of vehicle to vehicle (V2) communications. CAMP is an organization of vehicle manufacturers working together to finalize V2V standards.

Safety applications where cars are in close proximity to each other need low latency, high availability short-range communication between cars that goes beyond normal Wi-Fi. “This is 802.11p stripped of all the handshaking,” says Schulman. The broadcast message is quite simple: ten times a second, it transmits the vehicle’s presence for another vehicle to detect it. “The trick is how do you get it on all cars,” asks Schulman.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) plans to write a regulation starting in 2013 technology requiring the technology on all new vehicles. “Next year there will be a trial in the United States of about 1500 cars, trucks, buses, and intersections,” says Schulman. The trial will run for about a year and after that, if everything goes as planned, the standards will be finalized.

The Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) network uses 5.9 GHz with 75 MHz of spectrum allocated by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC). “Were using one channel out of seven as a safety channel,” says Schulman. He considers safety as the leading application for DSRC and that NHTSA may regulate that drivers have at least one channel in their car dedicated to this communication.

Getting a Spec

Initial V2V efforts started in 1995, when CAMP members decided to work together on pre-competitive specs. By 2006 the group had determined that some useful functionality could be obtained so they focused their efforts on enhancing the tool with smart intersections in 2009. That’s when the members and U.S. Department of Transportation Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA) determined that the technology really needed to be pushed through to deployment.

For the current testing, the goal is to have the 1500 vehicles interact everyday so they need to be reasonably close proximity to each other on a routine basis. Even though a lot of testing has been performed on the test track researchers need to see how these messages come together in real world application. The actual test location is still being determined.

The technology is reasonably low cost because vehicles already have Wi-Fi and GPS it just requires a modified version of Wi-Fi 802.11 P.

“This is a low-cost option but it doesn’t work until everybody’s got it,” says Schulman. “We’re looking at retrofit kits that we can put on existing cars.” Ford demonstrated the avoidance of several typical crash scenarios at the event using V2V technology.