MV+AI: A 360-DEGREE VIEW OF RISK

Lytx recently hosted a webinar entitled 360° Vision: Enabling Change for the Future of Road Safety, to outline the ways that new technologies enable drivers to proactively change behaviour, to avoid incidents. This post summarises the major points covered in the webinar.

Technologies such as fleet telematics and dashcams provide review to determine what really happened after an incident but do little to lower risk or prevent problems. To solve this problem, Lytx has turned its sights on eliminating distracted driving, which is a factor in 30% of crashes. With a convergent MV+AI (machine vision plus artificial intelligence) platform, risky behaviour can be identified and flagged, allowing drivers to correct themselves before an incident occurs.

Improving Safety

The driver is the most important safety feature in the cab of a commercial vehicle. Any added safety technology or driver behaviour system must therefore balance safety and driver empowerment. This has driven a shift away from traditional video telematics systems that emphasise management tools, in favour of modern solutions that empower the driver to make their own corrections before problems occur.

Traditional telematics systems can detect triggers such as harsh braking or swerving but can't give insight about why these events occurred. Driver behaviour in the moments before an event is invisible to traditional trigger-based systems. A driver who is obeying the speed limit, staying in a good lane position, while using one or perhaps even both hands to eat lunch, appears to be a perfectly safe driver. As long as no incident occurs. With limited to no ability to capture that behaviour, a company might never understand the risk presented by the driver.

The technology now exists to detect and identify risky behaviour, whether it occurs inside or outside the cab. With MV+AI, numerous risky behaviours can be identified and flagged, notifying the driver to make a correction. In Europe, the General Safety Regulation will require all new vehicles by 2022 to warn the driver in case of drowsiness or distraction.

Managing Cost

No one knows more about the cost of risk than insurance companies. Across Europe, many insurance companies end up operating at a loss as claims exceed premiums. Average repair costs are up as much as 40% over the last 8 years. Insurance companies are turning to technology to lower risk.

As distraction is a major risk factor in accidents, insurance companies are seeing the value of MV+AI in identifying risk before it happens. To help lower costs, insurers encourage their customers to adopt this technology, offering lower premiums or rebates as an incentive.

Insurance companies want to move beyond yesterday's reactive technology, which only offers a first notice of loss (FNOL), and help drive the adoption of technologies that identify risk before something happens, enriching telematics data with context that helps show the big picture.

Overcoming Barriers to Adoption

Resistance to adoption is driven by perceptions about privacy, data protection, and regulations. In some regions, privacy laws determine how long video data can be retained or might prohibit installing a dashcam on the windscreen at all. Companies establish different policies depending on local regulations and how they want to manage driver privacy. Some companies only want to know what's happening outside the vehicle, but due to company or country policies, may not want to see inside the cab.

To overcome these barriers, solutions must be flexible enough to adapt to highly differentiated data environments with different privacy, retention, and policy requirements. This requires a highly configurable solution, putting the choice in the hands of the user.

Building a Convergent Solution

A highly configurable MV+AI based system is a convergence of technologies, incorporating multiple solutions into a single platform. To tame all this capability for integration into diverse existing environments, a convergent solution must be:

• Simple — easy to install and configure, so that fleet teams can do it themselves
• Smart — providing not just real-time* data, but proactive alerts that empower drivers
• Connected — letting fleet managers choose the data they want and how it's integrated

Our sophisticated solution lets you tailor the integration to your needs, integrating data seamlessly with your existing platform.

Unlike traditional video telematics systems, which only provide data after the fact, a solution based on MV+AI gives a forward-looking, 360-degree view of risk across the whole fleet. With a richer understanding of driver behaviour, and the tools to help drivers take charge of their own improvement, you can reduce costs, improve productivity, and most importantly ensure that your drivers get home safely at the end of every shift.

Watch the webinar! 

* Subject to available cellular network coverage