Follow that car: This screenshot shows how a parent might track two teenage drivers in real time.
AT&T
By merging data from cars' onboard computers and drivers' smart
phones, AT&T researchers have created a system that reports on
drivers' real-time behavior and long-term driving trends—and reveals
whether a particular mistake might have been caused by phone use.
The company envisions the prototype system as a cloud-based chaperone for teen drivers. But it could rate any driver's abilities, and any change in those abilities, over time. "It allows you, as a parent, to monitor kids' driving behavior in real time. And if your kid is SMS-ing while driving, you will be able to log it—and even remotely disable the phone," says Raz Dar, business manager at AT&T's business incubator in Ra'anana, Israel. "The only thing he could do to prevent it is take out the unit from the car—unplug it—but we can detect that, too, and send an alert."
The company envisions the prototype system as a cloud-based chaperone for teen drivers. But it could rate any driver's abilities, and any change in those abilities, over time. "It allows you, as a parent, to monitor kids' driving behavior in real time. And if your kid is SMS-ing while driving, you will be able to log it—and even remotely disable the phone," says Raz Dar, business manager at AT&T's business incubator in Ra'anana, Israel. "The only thing he could do to prevent it is take out the unit from the car—unplug it—but we can detect that, too, and send an alert."
It works like this: a device plugged into a car's electronic
diagnostic port inside the engine compartment beams out vehicle
information such as speed, acceleration rate, steering, and
braking—together with GPS coordinates. Meanwhile, an app on the phone
beams out information on its usage.
Then, in an AT&T cloud, the two streams of information are
analyzed, folding in additional information such as speed limits on the
stretch of roadway involved. The result: alerts sent to the parent's
phone describing where the kid is, whether he is exceeding the speed
limit, whether he's wearing a seat belt, whether he has braked or
steered abruptly, and whether he was talking or texting when those
things happened.
The system is still a research project, and there is no announced
timetable for commercialization. Ultimately, AT&T hopes to sell or
license the system as a product, and also open up the cloud system for
developers to create new apps such as tracking an elderly driver's
aptitude over time, says Dar.
The company also envisions a day when insurance companies offer a
discount to drivers who submit to the monitoring and show themselves to
be good drivers who don't text while driving. Insurance companies have
already started down this path.
Progressive Insurance, for example,
offers an optional Snapshot program
that involves plugging a device into a car's onboard diagnostic
computer. The device measures in real time when drivers use the car, how
far they drive, and how hard they hit the brakes. Drivers can get a
discount of up to 30 percent—or, in two states, a rate hike if the news
is bad.
The AT&T technology is the result of a collaboration between
AT&T and an Israeli startup, Traffilog, that already provides
drivers and fleet managers with real-time alerts on unsafe driving as
well as periodic reports aimed at improving driver behavior and vehicle
maintenance.
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