Zigbee as a means to reduce the number of blind spot incidents of a truck

Every year in Europe, about 1500 people die in traffic because they are not noticed by the truck driver. This problem could be solved by developing a wireless communication system where the truck driver and the cyclist are informed about each others presence. In this paper a test setup is presented in which the position of the cyclist is determined and displayed on a screen when being in the neighborhood of a truck. The cyclist gets an indication about notification by the truck. Because of the fast changing network, the cyclist must be added quickly to the network and the position must be updated very fast. For this reason a Zigbee communication system is used. The position of the cyclist is displayed in zones around the truck. The setup is experimentally tested and it is demonstrated that the proposed setup leads to a reliable and fast method to reduce the number of blind spot incidents.