An innovative complete solution for health safety of children unintentionally forgotten in a car: a smart Arduino-based system with user app for remote control

This paper describes an innovative complete car control system against children abandonment in unattended vehicles. Even if systems of this kind are already available in automotive market, other solutions are currently object of intense researches by several important R&D centres or under patent procedure. In this paper, it is provided a description of the technologies already adopted in the currently used car control systems and in those that are in research and testing phase too. Then, it will be introduced the proposed control system, which enables to improve all described systems by providing innovative technologies and functionalities. The proposed system implements a microwave motion sensor, two infrared sensors, a carbon dioxide sensor, a temperature/humidity sensor, a vocal detector and a micro-camera. These acquisition devices are connected to a microcontroller board that is able to combine all acquired data for detecting the alarm scenario and consequently acting some warning procedures: alarm SMS transmission with vehicle GPS position, vehicle’s horn activation and/or car windows lowering. Thanks to such wide set of sensors, the system can correlate the acquired information in order to ensure a good detection capability in every condition in which it can operate.