Drivecam System

Had a meeting yesterday with some folks from Drivecam which was pretty interesting. They provide tools for monitoring and assessing driving risk, primarily for commercial vehicles.

These include a data trace (e.g. lateral, longitudinal and vertical acceleration), video of the road as well as of the driver and audio. The system continually records but only retains data for 12 second periods in most cases, when certain thresholds are exceeded (e.g. hard braking event) or the driver initiates recording. These periods include 8 seconds prior to the trigger point and 4 seconds after, similar to the methodology used in SAE J2728 (Heavy Vehicle Event Data Recorder recommended practice) currently underdevelopment.

It is essentially a closed loop feedback tool to quantify driver behavior and performance, which is then used with coaching to reduce a fleet's overall risk.

It's similar in some ways to data acquisition tools originally used in motorsport but on the other end of the spectrum: To minimize risk rather than maximize speed.

The future direction is especially interesting as there are opportunities to layer data (see augmented reality) across multiple sources to further enhance and expand the system's capabilities, which would in turn improve road safety.