crashcam app

The Idea

• Since smartphones are often used as car navigation systems, you might benefit from their universality.
• They are normally placed at the windscreen and look at the streets by accident
• In the unpleasant event of an accident, they could have taken a video or pictures of the event... when they had known before ...
• The crashcam app would therefore take pictures all the time and when the accelerometer tells the app that it might have experienced a crash, it saves these pictures away...
• It is questionable, if the recorded pictures can be evaluated as forensical proof, but they can at least give the owner and eye witness a clue what has happened and boost his sureness about the event.

Implementation

• The best (straight-forward) implementation would be the integration into the navigation software
• Information like the gps coordinates (that are already evaluated by the navigation software) would also be available and help to form a good picture of the situation (speed).
• The pictures might be saved raw to ram (in 800x600 this would be 0.5 MB per frame)
• When you make one frame per second and you grab 100 MB of the RAM, you can save 3 minutes of  footage in a cyclic memory that always overwrites the oldest data
• In the event of a car crash, the data should be written to the SD card. Writing to it all the time would lead to a reduced lifetime of the card ... but it would increase the chances of having the data after the crash.
• A second app (which might not have to be implemented as will) could start the crashcam app every time, the navigation software is started and shut it down once the navigation software is closed.
• The smartphone is normally placed in a recharge-station, so the increased battery usage shouldn't be a big problem

Already doubts

• Will a smartphone at the windshield survive a normal car crash? I would give it a chance of 50%
• Will the battery stay in the phone? Should depend on the phone...