students enrolled in the Electronic Engineering degree course at the University of Bologna have invented an intelligent helmet designed to increase the safety of motorcyclists. The innovative project, called SHELMET (Smart Helmet: intelligent self-sustaining multi sensors system for bikers), won first place at the Texas Instruments Innovation Challenge, the largest student electronics contest in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, which this year saw 900 undergraduate, master's and PhD students attending.
SHELMET is an intelligent and multi-function helmet, equipped with a series of innovative integrated sensors capable of signaling dangerous situations, such as falling asleep for example. Furthermore, thanks to an infrared video camera, the helmet allows you to increase visibility at night: it can detect people or animals on the edge of a dark road and view them on an LCD display that the motorcyclist sees at the side of his field of vision. The various functions are operated with voice commands which allow the biker to never take his hands off the handlebar. And as well as intelligent, the innovative helmet is also green, because it uses circuits capable of recovering energy from solar and kinetic sources.
The three creators of SHELMET are Tommaso Polonelli, Angelo D'Aloia and Lorenzo Spadaro, students of Electronic Engineering with a passion for engines. The Unibo professor Luca Benini and the researcher Michele Magno guided them in the realization of the project.
Tommaso, Lorenzo and Angelo, together with Michele Magno, are now leaving for Monaco, where the team will receive a cash prize, will present SHELMET at the prestigious Electronica fair and will participate in Entrepreneurship Training, a personalized workshop at the Center for Innovation and Business Creation of TUM – Technical University of Munich, with entrepreneurs, lenders, marketing experts and incubators.
