The Mayday Plus project has developed a special emergency response communications system at Minnesota State Patrol and Mayo Clinic emergency dispatch centers. The system provides authorities with automatic collision notification, and location and crash severity data from in-vehicle devices. If we can reduce emergency response times significantly with a system of this type, we could stand to save many lives and reduce disability. When a crash occurs, the Mayday Plus system relays information from the vehicle on its location, direction of crash impact, the vehicle s final resting position, and the change in velocity lost during the crash. After transmitting this data, the system then opens a direct voice connection to passengers in the car.
Response time is critical in our rural areas.
Sponsored by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the ACN project developed crash severity reporting capabilities. Mayday Plus has built on the foundation developed during the earlier test by developing a system that intelligently routes emergency data to responders based on the vehicle s location and the type of emergency. It allows the dispatchers who must respond to the emergency in the given jurisdiction to receive the emergency information directly from in-vehicle devices. Mayday devices are available to consumers today. There is more death, injury and economic loss caused by vehicle crashes every year than caused by the Gulf War, Hurricane Andrew, the 1993 Midwest Floods and the Northridge California Earthquake combined.