CINCINNATI (WXIX) – New technology has been designed to help protect drivers and passengers from the dangers of wrong-way crashes.

Flashing lights and “wrong-way” signage on highway exit ramps are a proactive measure to prevent wrong-way drivers, but much of stopping these types of wrecks is reactive, because when someone One takes the highway in the wrong direction, every second counts.

The impact of these accidents is often head-on and of those who survive these accidents, many, like Morgan Story, are left with lasting injuries.

“She had multiple fractures in her hip, her leg, her arm, there was a brain hemorrhage,” Richard Wimmer said of Story’s injuries.

Story, the mother of Wimmer’s children, is still on the road to recovery nearly eight months after being hit by a wrong-way driver on March 20.

“From what the doctors are saying, it could take up to two years for her to be hospitalized,” Wimmer said.

The driver who hit Story on Ronald Reagan Highway near Hamilton Avenue has died, according to the Springfield Township Police Department.

Police said Walter Johnson, 80, was not on the highway long before the crash and the calls to officers came after the impact.

There was no way to warn Story of the danger heading her way, but that’s not the case with every wrong-way crash.

The Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) has smart cameras that monitor major roads, intersections and highways across the state.

“The system can detect vehicles, motorcycles, and even foreign objects, large foreign objects moving at high speed or at a slow pace in the wrong direction,” explains Lewis Stallworth.

Stallworth works for Bosch, a global technology and services company.

Bosch cameras and wrong-way detection software have been monitoring the roads of Ohio and Kentucky for a decade.

If this system detects a wrong-way driver, red flags start to go up.

“It then sends an alert to the TMC, the traffic management center, for those images and video to appear on the screen so they can be monitored, but it also has the ability to send an alert in real time to both law enforcement and the general public,” says Stallworth.

ODOT doesn’t have cameras on every stretch of highway across the state, leaving some gaps.

Bosch hopes to fill these gaps by offering apps downloadable to your car or smartphone that track the direction of travel of anyone who downloads the technology.

“Once per second, as you approach the freeway entrance ramp, we start pinging the cloud, once per second, so we can compare your direction of travel with the correct direction of travel” , explains Elizabeth Kao.

Kao, who also works at Bosch, says he has deployed this software to European automakers, and it allows them to send warnings and alerts based on your specific location and the road you are driving on.

In 2022, Bosch claims to have warned 600 people that they were going in the wrong direction. They also warned 6,000 people that a wrong-way driver was heading their way and said no one who received the warning was involved in an accident.

Bosch says it is now working with several automakers in the United States to integrate the technology into your dashboard.

“Actually, we could work with the automakers and release this next year, in 2025,” Kao says. “Again, it’s not that difficult to do with automakers because it doesn’t require additional hardware. The software is something that we can work with automakers to integrate into their vehicles, and then we activate the service. »

Bosch says they also offer this technology for free to app developers who want to include it in their apps.

There’s an app developer who’s got a hold of it. The app is called Sygic.

When we talk about new technologies, we always wonder what information they track.

Bosch says the technology will track your location and direction of travel in relation to on- and off-ramps.

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