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Background
K-Safe’s vision has always been to improve the safety of cyclists and other vulnerable road users, through the use of innovative technology.
However, when avid cyclist and K-Safe Co-Founder, Barry Green, was crashed into by a van while out cycling, this personal experience sparked the K-Safe team into thinking whether they could create a way of automatically detecting incidents, and more importantly, if there was a way of quickly raising the alarm, letting loved ones know where you are and hopefully getting emergency services there more efficiently.
Without the help and support received from Sensor City, we wouldn’t be where we are today.”
Our intelligent road safety mobile app, Busby, has been developed to predict, prevent, detect and analyse road accidents.
Approaching Sensor City
Originally based in Liverpool Science Park, K-Safe moved into Sensor City in June 2018 to take advantage of the on-site support for SMEs which includes business support and hot desking facilities.
One of their early challenges was to maintain focus and the Business Development team at Sensor City, particularly Dr Joanne Phoenix, provided a lot of guidance to the start-up. Thanks to her connections and support network, Sensor City was able to introduce and subsequently help K-Safe appoint an additional director.
Partner Support
With a strengthened team and wider knowledge base, K-Safe began developing a ground-breaking road safety platform, Busby, which turns a user’s mobile phone into an intelligent incident detection sensor in seconds and provides real-time incident detection & alerting.
The technology behind this innovative solution uses a motion sensor (accelerometer, gyroscope and mag) and location-based technology, to detect incident conditions for a wide range of use-cases. There is a huge potential social impact of adoption of this app, being able to minimise incident response times and the ultimate goal of saving lives can benefit everyone.
Being based at Sensor City has opened up a number of fruitful opportunities for K-Safe, resulting in the soft launch of their Busby Platform in July 2019. They already have over 1,000 users signed up and plan to work with schools, road safety groups and cycling associations to roll out their technology throughout the UK.
Working into the future
K-Safe have worked hard adding new features to their Busby app, which were requested by early alpha users, and have this week launched a wider public beta release of the platform.
Their continued use of the AWS cloud-based platform will allow K-Safe to scale quickly and adopt additional analytic and machine learning services as they continue to grow.
To be amongst the first to benefit from the incident monitoring provided by Busby, simply sign up via your mobile device below:
Results
Busby aims to massively reduce road incidents or at least the severity of them, by getting help to the injured user quicker than ever before. The free app is therefore designed for use by both vulnerable road users (ie cyclists), as well as other considerate drivers.
Awareness of Busby has grown enormously, and the road safety app has been recognised as an innovative solution which could save thousands of lives each year. K-Safe were recently named as finalists in the ‘New Business of the Year’ category at the 2019 Regional Business Awards and were also one of ten winners of our AWS Growth Package Prize. Their app has also been described as having the potential to grow to become the highest impact road safety innovation since the introduction of the seatbelt.