ELSA stands for Electroluminescent Safety Apparatus and is a road sign that notifies drivers to give them a warning on roads that may not be very safe. Our team derived the name from the character Elsa from Frozen. The name was picked because our project is for the roads in Connecticut, which frequently get iced over during winter, and was also an attempt to not use the word electroluminescent every time we mention the product. Connecticut is full of rural roads that are old, winding, and just really hard to drive on. Some of you may relate to this, but our group testified that we tend to drive a little too fast on these roads and catch a scare when one of the turns is a little sharper than we imagined. Most of the time, there is a sign signaling that the road is bending, but it doesn’t do much justice in slowing us down. This is where our product ELSA comes in. Our sign uses Electroluminescent panels that light up and really catch the attention of the driver, signaling them to slow down or to give them other road-specific warnings. According to the GHSA (Governors Highway Safety Association), Speeding is the cause of 27% of accidents on rural roads, and nearly half of the fatalities in crashes involving speeding happen on rural roads. This means that with 96 speeding deaths per year in just the state of CT per year, we could save up to 45 lives a year with ELSA.

Our team collaborated with Electrical and Computer Engineering 14 on this project.