NetraDyne’s Artificial Intelligence platform improves road safety

With approximately 3.5 million professional truck drivers in the United States alone and the average driver expected to travel between 2,000 and 3,000 miles per week, accidents are inevitable hazards. Keeping this major issue in mind, fleets are looking to leverage advanced technology that enables fleets to make the right decisions with confidence. According to a May 2015 (revised) report from the US Department of Transportation and The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the economic cost of motor vehicle crashes that occurred in 2010 totaled $242 billion; lost workplace productivity costs totaled $57.6 billion, while lost household productivity totaled $19.7 billion.

In addition to the cost of crashes, in 2014, according to the ATA Truck Driver Shortage Analysis, the trucking industry was short 38,000 drivers, with the shortage expected to reach nearly 48,000 by the end of 2015. Today, motor carriers struggle to find enough qualified drivers, which makes the shortage “feel” much worse than the numbers in this report. Many carriers, despite being short drivers, are highly selective in hiring drivers because they have made safety and professionalism high priorities.

In order to avoid lost productivity and improve road safety for their drivers, fleet managers are turning to video-based driver performance solutions. However, most current fleet management applications that utilize video data simply record video when prompted by an inertial sensor (e.g., when brakes are engaged or the truck swerves out of position). This type of video feed is helpful in understanding why an incident happened, but is prone to false alarms and ultimately does little to help provide a complete view that can prevent that incident from reoccurring in the future.

Fundamentally, video footage analysis, today, is manual. Complicating matters, less than five percent of all video surveillance being captured in the world is reviewed by a human, which still represents huge amounts of data and can lead to reviewer fatigue and inconsistency in the analysis.

There is a company with a solution focused on capturing positive driving along with coachable events, that has pioneered a new approach to driver safety. Founded in 2015, NetraDyne is creating a groundbreaking artificial intelligence (AI) platform, called Driveri™ that is designed to disrupt commercial vehicle and driver analytics, and improve driver safety. The company introduced the first commercial vehicle technology combining AI with video to detect, reason, and determine causality of both positive and negative driving events. When used in the transportation industry, fleets can quickly apply resources to recognize superior performance or address at-risk driving before it becomes a severe event. “There are other video recording systems out there, but no one else is combining artificial intelligence and computer vision to automate safety alerts and provide actionable business intelligence in near real-time,” explained NetraDyne President Sandeep Pandya. “This represents a revolution in fleet video analytics, as it proactively ensures road safety. Most video telematics applications simply record video for analysis afterward in case of a problem, and the delay may be hours or even days between event and fleet notification. Our system identifies cars, trucks, pedestrians, traffic signals and road signs and processes the video at the vehicle level, delivering meaningful information within minutes”