A Novel Vehicular Heatstroke Prevention by Smart HVAC System Model

Today, automobile safety has become one of the paramount focus areas by car manufacturers. The vehicles of today have increasingly grown more intelligent to keep passengers safe on the road. Apart from traffic safety, non-crash safety issues progressively turn out to be another prime concern. Currently, vehicular heatstroke deaths in parked vehicles are one of the major focuses in the non-crash safety domain. 2018 saw a total of 52 American children died while 90% out of 8290 calls to RSPCA concerned trapped dogs in scorching cars. Thus, we proposed a prototype system with the capability to monitor vehicle conditions and take appropriate actions to save a life. The objective of this work is to reduce the possibility of uninformed passengers, especially children, the elderly, and the pets, from unnecessary deaths or suffering from trapped car-related heatstroke. This prototype can be further enhanced to smartly communicate with other Electrical Control Units (ECUs) inside the vehicle via an in-vehicle communication network, i.e. CAN bus to further improve vehicle safety.