DriveRisk team with the Safety Innovation Award

Our Winning 2021 HVIA National Awards Nomination Submission

We’re over the moon to have taken out the Safety Innovation Award at this year’s HVIA National Awards. Our team works tirelessly to bring new and effective safety innovations to Australian roads with a core focus on bringing drivers home safely.

Without any further ado, we thought we’d share our winning award submission below, so you can see for yourself what made our Lytx DriveCam SF300 Video Event Recorder take home the trophy.

 

What is the safety product or system and how does it work? 

The Lytx DriveCam SF300 Video Event Recorder is being submitted for the Safety Innovation Award. The DriveCam SF300 enables the video-based Driver Safety Program for transport fleets. This device has MV+AI (Machine Vision and Artificial Intelligence) which uses the internal lens as a sensor to directly detect risky ‘patterns’ of driver behaviour in real-time. Consider Machine Vision as the eyes of the device and Artificial Intelligence as the brains. The DriveCam SF300 MV+AI technology is trained to recognise high-risk patterns of driving behaviours using over 220 billion kms of human-curated, verified, and labelled examples of high-risk driving behaviours resulting in high accuracy detection with a low false-positive rate.

DriveRisk uses this technology to uncover, identify, categorise and ultimately change the risk in client fleets. Once the risks in your on-road operations are uncovered using MV+AI, our solution helps you to manage them effectively in a SMS process aligned to Chain of Responsibility (CoR). This DriveCam platform helps mitigate incidents, reduce collisions, and motivate your drivers to be safer.

The Machine Vision and Artificial Intelligence-powered SF300 was released in July 2020 in Australia following extensive field testing on right-hand drive vehicles in local conditions.

 

What impact has the product or system had on heavy vehicle safety? 

Previous DriveCam devices provided a “sampled risk” based on G-Force triggered video events which were then evaluated for root cause behaviours. The introduction of MV+AI, saw a spike in risky events detected as these previously unseen behaviours were now uncovered due to the new direct detection technology, i.e., we don’t need a vehicle-based trigger to identify a risky event. As we have seen before with detection improvements, uncovering new risks allowed clients new opportunities to use the DriveCam video-based coaching platform to change the driver’s risky behaviour before it led to a serious incident.

MV+AI is focussed on common collision leading behaviours mainly classed as distraction – mobile phone use, food and drink consumption, smoking, and generalised inattention as well as the most basic safety feature – seat belts. MV+AI captured more than 4 times more examples than previously.

The SF300 also enabled real-time in-cab alerts to drivers. Resultant data shows a greater than 50% reduction in mobile phone use since its introduction. Additionally, this positive behavioural change has become a sustained habit. MV+AI detection now provides sustained behaviour reporting, not just individual events, which increases driver safety engagement. 

Impact on the business - actual DriveRisk client data trends graph

 

How transferable is this safety product or system to other branches of the business?

Our Driver Safety program using the DriveCam SF300 is completely scalable – both in the number of vehicles, drivers and locations, as well as the type of freight task. Any business which employs drivers, whether employees or sub-contractors, using any combination of heavy, medium, or light vehicles can improve safety with this technology. DriveCam SF300 based driver safety program is effective in any vehicle used for any freight task. The vehicle type and task may change the frequency and severity of risks detected as well as the repair cost or in worst-case scenarios the potential for disastrous outcomes.

The main barrier is perception. Driver induction sessions explaining the technology and its purpose break down these barriers leading to a successful safety program. The fundamental issue is proactive engagement of the people driving the vehicles, not the type of vehicle or technology. DriveCam SF300 generated video events and the coaching approach help driver engagement and understanding to create meaningful change in the safety culture and real-world outcomes.

If you have drivers, you have risk. DriveCam SF300 can detect and help address risk before an incident occurs in any business with vehicles. 

 

What level of consultation or engagement (internal or external) was undertaken to implement the safety solution?

The DriveCam SF300 was introduced in July 2020 into the Australian market following successful launch in the North American market in 2019.

This staged approach was for DriveRisk to ensure that the testing and accuracy of the Australian release meant the DriveCam SF300 MV+AI “learnt” driving on the right-hand side of the vehicle as accurately as left-hand drive markets. This was done via extensive engagement and consultation with several of our key clients to add value to their risk profiling and operational strategies.

Additionally, we engaged with key clients to test the in-cab audio alerting features to ensure that we didn’t add to the noise and distraction in the cab. This also allowed for fine-tuning of the configuration to suit Australian conditions, expectations and regulations. We wanted to confirm we provide a balance for effective driver engagement, self-correction and in-cab feedback.

 

How effective has the safety solution been?

Data Driven Client Story

We analysed the data from a client that began their safety journey using the DriveCam SF300 with traditional G-Force and GPS based triggers. This provided a baseline for the traditional technology and by all metrics, they were performing well from a safety perspective.

Once MV+AI functionality was enabled, event frequency more than doubled and risk severity increased >4 fold. This spike caused concern as they believed they were low risk. However, with a good coaching program and excellent driver engagement, they managed to reduce their metrics back to earlier levels. This meant more than halving the frequency and reducing severity below 25% of peak risk.

This highlights tangible outcomes for MV+AI:

  • Ability to uncover hidden risks
  • Video-based coaching changes behaviour

Effectiveness - risk & frequency graph

Audible Alerts Trial

A 40-week trial was done looking at the impact of MV+AI in-cab alerts on mobile phone use. On enabling of the in-cab audio alerts following baseline evaluation, an immediate reduction of greater than 50% was observed. Even more encouraging is the fact that this 50% improvement was sustained for the remainder of the trial period. 

Efficacy analysis - handheld device use with audio alert graph

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