This Student's Smart AI-Powered Device Aims To Reduce India's 1.5 Lakh Annual Road Deaths

An estimated 1,50,000 people are killed in car accidents in India each year. The specific causes behind each of these isn't clear, but it's likely a lot of them are at night.

And of those, many were probably because drivers were blinded by oncoming cars using their high beams.

Rishank Kanaparti is just a 9th Std student at National Public School in Bangalore, but he already understands this. And he figured he'd take a crack at coming up with a solution for this. He decided the best way to do that would be to build an automated system that would act preemptively to avoid drivers blinding each other at night.

That's where LightSafe comes in, a device designed and developed solely by Kanaparti. It uses sensors linked to it to detect the headlights of an oncoming vehicle, while his algorithm determines its position in relation to the one the device is installed in. His original prototype involved a Raspberry Pi connected to a servo motor and a Lego mechanical arm. Whenever the sensors detected oncoming headlights, the arm would flip the beam to the low setting, and flip it back after it passed.

Kanaparti wasn't happy with that though, he wanted a system that could be integrated with modern cars, and with no moving parts near the driver. So he worked on the device some more, rigging it to a smartphone capable of communicating with the car's Onboard Diagnostics system. That way, he could have the car's systems itself change the beam settings when needed.

Thanks to his work, LightSafe is incredibly affordable to produce. Even better is that it can also be easily integrated into any existing vehicle, regardless of its year of manufacture, and doesn't need to have the feature built in from the start.

Kanaparti says he hopes his system, or something like it, can be easily and quickly adopted around the world. That way, we're all keeping each other safe on the night roads.