Vehicle Occupancy Detection System

Personal vehicles often become traps for unattended occupants throughout the year. Sadly, this can lead to severe health complications or even death if exposed for too long. Although these complications arise primarily in hot climates, it has been demonstrated that they can happen in any environment. Prolonged exposure to an unfamiliar and often dangerous setting without competent human intervention can be detrimental to health. This problem predominantly impacts pets and young children. In an effort to reduce these preventable health complications and possible deaths, we have developed a vehicle occupancy detection system. The goal of developing this occupancy detection system was to first determine if an unattended child or pet resided in the vehicle. If detection occurred, the real-time climate was then sampled. If the climate conditions were deemed hazardous or detrimental to health in any way, an alert would then be sent to a parent or guardian via a text message. Main system components include passive infrared detection sensors, temperature and humidity sensors, Bluetooth modules for communication between subsystems, and an SMS module for cellular alert communication. This system process aligns with efforts in reducing as many preventable health complications and deaths due to prolonged exposure to dangerous environments as possible.