Smarter, Greener, Safer Cities and Roadways Technologically Enabled by MHAV

A call to action to transportation and civic leaders

To enable communication amongst city infrastructures and all modes of transportation—including pedestrian—sfara and its leading-edge technology partners introduce MHAV™ (Multi-Modal Hazard Avoidance).

Because of our outdated transportation and city models, people are dying, our air is being polluted and productivity is lost. Last year, in the U.S. alone, over 50,000 loved ones were killed by a vehicle collision, most caused by avoidable human error. Over 87 billion dollars a year are wasted because of lost productivity while commuters sit in traffic jams. Pollution from those same jams is estimated to add 18 billion in cost to our healthcare system, while also diminishing local businesses by dis-incentivizing walking, cycling, and scootering.

A great hope for the future is in converging the promise of autonomous vehicles with that of smart cities, where all moving things and city infrastructures are communicating, coordinating, and predicting. Those of us within affected industries and governments have been excited for decades over the solutions offered by cities and roadways that are smarter, greener, and incredibly safer. But that hope has stalled due to infrastructure challenges, with not much promise of resolution in the near future. Our innovative over-the-top (OTT) technology is about to change everything.

Introducing Multi-Modal Hazard Avoidance (MHAV). MHAV is a smartphone-based solution enabling an edge-based communication infrastructure amongst all modes of transportation.

In an MHAV world, drivers, riders, pedestrians, first responders and families are safer during the transition to full autonomy that is occurring over the next 35 years. Because MHAV is smartphone based, every individual carrying a device can be immediately (and anonymously) connected, communicating, coordinating and predicting movement with other sensing devices thereby creating a Sphere of Safety™ for the user that can manifest in a multitude of ways, including:

When a teenager pedals his bike into traffic from behind an object that obscures him from the sight of human drivers and vehicle sensors, MHAV will have predicted his trajectory and alerted the drivers, autonomous systems and the teen.

If a vehicle is broken down around a curve, MHAV can alert a smart car’s automatic braking system to reduce speed, even though a truck in front of him is blocking the sensors and its distracted driver is headed full speed for disaster.

When paramedics are rushing to the scene of an emergency, MHAV can alert drivers and autonomous systems to yield and clear a path for the ambulance.

What is apparent from these scenarios is that even in an advanced state of autonomy, there will always be unconnected things acting in unpredictable ways. As such, even the most robust embedded autonomous sensing systems will be deeply challenged. Without MHAV, there will be a difficult and chaotic transition for several decades, where dumb, smart, and autonomous vehicles will have to share the roads despite not being able to communicate with each other. Without MHAV, safety issues and deaths during this transition period will radically slow the growth of autonomous initiatives and ultimately smart cities.

To realize the profound benefits of this new world, MHAV had to overcome many hurdles that have stalled development of traditional technical paradigms. The biggest of these industry challenges is the lack of ubiquitous sensors and effective communications infrastructure. However, given MHAV is based off of sfara’s patented AI, running natively on smart phones, it can be quickly deployed using the devices in the hands of citizens and existing carrier networks, allowing cities to quickly achieve critical levels of adoption.

But even with these sensor and infrastructure challenges solved, the underpinning technology necessary to bring this solution to life is formidable. In the end, it took a consortium of leading technology companies to converge the necessary technologies using their deeply specialized expertise. These companies are Solace, Accedian and Deutsche Telekom’s MobiledgeX.

“Mobile devices, dating back to the iPhone and Galaxy 5-series, are loaded with sensors, are deeply distributed and capable of running our sensor-fused AI, which natively runs on the smartphone to ensure quick and easy adoption by huge segments of the population,” said Erik Goldman, CEO of Sfara. “Notwithstanding, in order to realize our vision of MHAV, we knew we needed to bring in additional expertise from world-class partners who share sfara’s passion for saving lives.”

One challenge to MHAV was generated from the reality that mobile phones travel through zones and countries that are owned by diverse carrier networks using various technologies, many with data latency issues for creating time-sensitive data flow where milliseconds matter. These challenges are overcome by MobiledgeX who provides the edge computing capability. “Deutsche Telekom’s MobiledgeX allows smartphones to communicate to cloudlets at the speeds necessary for life-saving data exchange with infrastructure, no matter who owns the infrastructure,” said Eric Braun, CCO at MobiledgeX.

Additionally, MHAV data traffic must be prioritized so there is unfettered data flow. Simply put, you do not want a delay in critical safety data because someone else is a streaming a 4K movie trailer. Solace is handling the challenges of data prioritization and distribution. “Solace extrapolates data sent to the cloudlets in the cell towers, prioritizes that data and then shares it as needed amongst cloudlets, which will give MHAV data priority over other network traffic,” said Denis King, CEO, for Solace.

Lastly, like all data transmission technology, security is an issue. But the issue is amplified by the nature of MHAV data, where human lives and critical command-control information is at stake for smart cities. “Accedian will closely monitor cloudlet, network and application performance, as well as create auditable telemetry and user attribution, said “Dion Joannou, CEO, Accedian.

As a complete solution, MHAV will be one of the biggest breakthroughs in transportation infrastructure history, opening the pathway, and perpetual sustainability, for connected mobility, autonomous vehicles and smart cities. We have all been reading of this coming utopia for some time. With MHAV, the promise can now be the reality.

It is time to take action and initiate the transition to Smarter, Greener, Safer Cites and Roadways.

Get more information about MCAS >

PRESS CONTACT:
Sfara, Inc.
Rocco Tricarico
Chief Marketing Officer
[email protected]