BlueTraffic is a system designed to help drivers by giving them useful information on the traffic situation. This system integrates information on the vehicle’s GPS location with traffic news transmitted via the RDS radio channel. This integration offers an up to date information service that is contextual to the vehicle’s position and direction.

BlueTraffic communicates relevant news to the user via an everyday cell phone configured with a vocal synthesis function that gives the system greater usability.

As shown in the following picture, the system comprises an intelligent control unit connected via Bluetooth to a cell phone and GPS receiver.

A bi-directional protocol is used between the cell phone and control unit so that the user receives the news and can configure the control unit. While the GPS receiver emits a uni-directional protocol that continually supplies information on the vehicle’s position and direction. The protocol used follows the NMEA  standard.

At the heart of the BlueTraffic system is an intelligent control unit that the user interacts with, thanks to an application installed on the cell phone. Communication between control unit and cell phone takes place with Bluetooth technology. The control unit is an embedded Linux board developed by ACME.

The mobile application allows the user can regulate several parameters to improve the service that is based on general characteristics of the planned route. This application as been developed as a J2ME MIDLET (MIDP 2.0 and CLDC 1.0)

The telephone operator/control unit automatically seeks the GPS receiver – connected via Bluetooth and tunes into the FM frequency and then the RDS-TMC service.

When the vehicle is in motion, the control unit selects the news from TMC concerning the position/direction of the vehicle. With this information, the control unit composes a message that is sent to the telephone. Thanks to a vocal synthesis component on the telephone, the user is notified without being distracted from driving. On hearing the news from the system, the user can correct the route to avoid traffic problems.

The synthesis component has been developed by Loquendo and actually works on Symbian S60 platform. In particular the system has been developed using the Nokia N70 device.

In order to provide a modular architecture and the independence from the specific TTS technology, the Java application uses a TCP protocol to communicate with Loquendo's TTS engine. In order to do that we developed a custom messaging protocol and a Symbian server application which uses the API provided by Loquendo. This approach also allowed us to develop the GUI using the more comfortable J2ME platform.