Senior Design: SafeSense

In a spirit of entrepreneurship, Mechanical Engineering student, Jibran Nabeel together with Electrical Engineering students, Joshua Shelley and Toan Huynh formed a team in an effort to progress the designs and concepts behind Nabeel’s  start-up company, SafeSense.

Established in 2017 by co-founders Jibran Nabeel and Robert Decker, the company imagined technology that would enable bicycle safety beyond the helmet. Currently in prototyping stages, a combination of different sensors—such as a camera, ultrasonic sensor, and a mic-array are used to detect surrounding vehicles.

Nabeel has watched his initial vision grow and develop through his years at Drexel University. What began as merely a mission to change the way people think about bicycle safety has grown into something larger through development during Junior Design, and finally with Senior Design.

SafeSense expanded to include the team for Senior Design after drawbacks with Decker’s program eligibility due to department restrictions involving his major. They found students with relevant courses of study and a shared interest in cycling so were able to grow larger, adjusting to demands from their Senior Design program.

“The primary focus (of the project) is actually to develop the technology we envisioned. Initially, it was a completely different technology, but as the team grew, as we talked more about it—we realized we needed to shift more toward an A.I. system capable of updating itself and improving over time without major drawbacks,” Says Nabeel. “So as our technology matured, our vision of evolved.”

Nabeel is thankful for the access made available to his team, using labs, the machine shop, and resources through professors  regarding the Senior Design project. SafeSense was also recently featured in an article published by Yahoo News. Though the current pandemic has inhibited the team’s ability to access their office space, they have turned the situation around to benefit the company’s needs.

“Every missed end is an opportunity. There were some things that we were putting off because we were so focused on the project. Now we have the time to move away  from prototyping ,” says Nabeel. “We’re thinking about reaching out to different manufacturers, and  enhancing anything we can.We are so much more focused on developing the actual hardware.”

The SafeSense Senior Design process is still in development, and Nabeel sees a future for the company past Senior Design. With the ability to alter the way society views bicycle safety through their own patent pending machine vision based camera and the usage of Accident Detection technology, the team hopes to change the bicycle industry for the better. To learn more about the team’s technology, visit their website.