I remember that failure, too, along with an equally catestrophic failure or two on Titan 34 & Titan IV boosters. All of those failures happened very quickly and with no warning. Any abort mechanism would need to be able to failure detect indications early enough to get the crew away from the SRB. If there is a way to kill or reduce the SRB's thrust (such as blowing off the nozzle), you'd need time for that to happen, too. At a minimum, you'd probably need at least a couple seconds warning. That's a tough order.

The most common failure modes for solids are typically cracks in the propellant causing overpressure and insulation delamination. It might be possible to detect an overpressure condition and trigger an abort, but it'd have to be done very quickly to get the crew away in time. Perhaps some form of strain sensor in the casing could be used for confirmation (false alarms causing aborts would really suck). As for propellant delamination, I'm not certain what you could do to detect that. When the insulation separates, combustion heat reaches the casing. That can trigger uncontrolled combusion (overpressure) or perhaps burn through the casing. Perhaps the overpressure and strain sensors could detect those failure modes as well. It might also be a good idea to build the casings with a higher overpressure margin even though that means you'd have a weight penalty. Perhaps the Shuttle SRBs already have enough margin.