South Africa is like the Wild West (or the Wild South, rather) where road fatalities are concerned. Our statistics are currently at 47 road deaths per day.

Every time you get into a car, you’re faced with unroadworthy vehicles, drunk drivers, and drivers who insist on texting. The likelihood of meeting up in an accident rises every day. It’s a jungle out there. Driving is even considered less safe than bungee jumping, paragliding or even piloting (one of my favorite things to do).

So, let’s suppose you get into a serious car crash. You cannot move to grab your mobile phone which has disappeared into the crumpled confines of the car wreck. If help doesn’t arrive really soon, you or your passengers may die of blood loss from your injuries. Paramedics refer to this time as the ‘golden hour’. The sacred hour where your life or death hangs on the balance. It all comes down to the speed at which you receive medical attention. What do you do?

Thanks to a new smartphone app by the name of CrashDetech, you need not do anything for help to arrive. The app, which runs on IOS and Android platforms, has an auto-drive detection sensor that activates when your wheels start rolling.

In the event of a crash, you will receive a call. If there is no answer Emergency services will then be dispatched to your exact location, however remote.

The app took 18 months to develop. It is so clever that it knows the difference between a light whiplash-inducing fender-bender and a life-threatening accident. Neither will an ambulance arrive when you drop your phone on the bricks of your driveway.

According to CrashDetech developer and CEO of Dynamus Technologies, Jaco Gerrits, they spent a lot of time engineering a solution to eliminate false positives. The CrashDetech proprietary algorithm that monitors the phone’s sensors, has been able to eliminate them.

“The Sensors on the phone are able to pick up the force of acceleration (G-forces). A serious car crash can generate in excess of 30 G’s,” Gerrits explains.

The CrashDetech app has free and paid versions. The free version allows users to take 30 trips per month, and includes automatic crash detection and sending a text message to the user’s chosen next of kin.

To read more about this uniquely South African development, go to www.crashdetech.com