Are we ready to use technologies to enhance passenger safety and to prevent suicides?
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Are we as a community, open to deploy technology to assist in preventing suicide and enhanced passengers safety? Quite a dilemma in my personal view, more importantly today when we openly discuss in our society aspects such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), use of personal data, anonymization of collected data, etc
Based on behaviors, technology can support, locate and prevent suicide attempts with the combine use of camera, WIFI and artificial intelligence. In some countries this is already deployed with success. As a society, are we ready for the first step of this journey ? Same goes for road passenger safety and autonomous trains?
Suicides occur in all train platforms around the world, except those equipped with barrier systems that prevent people from accessing the tracks and that open only when the train stops at the station. The issue with this solution is that it remains expensive and doesn’t combine investments with other goals of passengers and platform safety.
Regarding autonomous trains, technology makes possible today to optimize the speed of trains and therefore better harmonize the traffic, improve punctuality, reduce energy consumption, and greater circulation capacity where the new track capacities are limited or impossible.
If more and more cities are implementing plans to reduce car traffic and want to give more space to pedestrians and soft modes of transport, the need to develop public transport and significantly improve existing ones are important economically and for our environment.
The challenge and decision we have to make: a train that leaves and arrives on time, without stress on the platform, where we can prevent suicide, in which everyone finds a seat and get internet high speed mobility services, is more economical and allows to travel safely, but at what price for our personal data ?
This future scenario will be based on “artificial intelligence, on the Internet of Things, big data and most importantly your data”.
I propose we cover these technologies and their community impacts in my next blogs …
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