Tag: Insurance

REAL TIME ONBOARD RISK ESTIMATION
CORRELATED WITH ROAD ACCIDENT

REAL TIME ONBOARD RISK ESTIMATION CORRELATED WITH ROAD ACCIDENT :
AN ENTIRELY SOLVED PROBLEM AND A PRODUCT ALREADY AVAILABLE FOR DEPLOYMENT

by NEXYAD

(Version Française ici)

INTRODUCTION

Measuring road safety in the context experienced by the driver is a topic of interest for several activities :
. car manufacturers, who can inform the driver of potential dangers
. autonomous vehicle developers who need to prove that the driving actually minimizes risk of accident.
. fleet managers and insurance companies who wish to measure the risk taken by drivers (how they drive)
. managers of road infrastructure that alway change infrastructure to adapt and lower the risk of accident

The company NEXYAD has been developing since 2001 an embedded onboard module, SafetyNex, to
estimate in real time the risk of accident.

PRECONCEIVED IDEAS ABOUT ROAD ACCIDENTS AND DRIVING STYLE

Many trials have been completed or in progress, particularly by insurance companies and fleet managers,
In order to measure what is called the “driving style”.

The assumption is that some drivers are more “nervous” than others, and that this has an impact on the accident: those that speed up or slow down quite often brutally would be “bad drivers” while those with a quieter driving style would be “good” drivers.
This assumption is contradicted by the facts. There is no statistical connection between the driving style and
the accident.

Formally, one can easily fancy very well that if a driver operates very quietly, without slowing, without
accelerating at 30 km / h, and if this driver passes through a stop road sign without braking … then the driving style is quiet but very accident-prone.
We then see that beyond the possible statistical link (that doesn’t exist), there can be no relationship of cause and effect.

All experiments that were conducted led to this result.
All those that will be conducted, based on more or less intelligent thresholding of the acceleration values are doomed to failure.
Do not confuse eco-driving and safe driving.

Driving style cannot be interpreted itself without context description :
. infrastructure shape and characteristic, on which the vehicle is traveling
. traffic (presence of other road users)
. weather conditions (visibility, grip, …)
. level of driver vigilance (distraction, drowsiness, sleep …)

NEXYAD has developed a scalable solution capable of taking into account all these factors.
SafetyNex is therefore able to estimate the risk of driving using all those variables.
Version 2.1 of SafetyNex, under deployment, takes into account the adequacy of driving style with the type and shape of infrastructure (breaks on route characteristics, turns, pedestrian crossings, intersections …).

This version has been intentionally reduced to « driving style vs infratructure characteristics », because it already gives a 90% correlation with accident and because this version is deployable at very low cost:
. on smart phone
. electronic device (developed by an automotive tier one company), without using the OBD socket)

CORRELATION OF RISK OF ACCIDENT ESTIMATED BY SafetyNex V2.1 AND ACCIDENT

NEXYAD participated in collaborative research programs since 2001, and worked then with experts from the road equipment.

In particular, SARI research program led to detecting what experts call “Break on the route characteristics”. For example, a turn with a big curve may be a danger when it arrives behind a long straight line, while the same curve will not be dangerous bend on a mountain road.

NEXYAD published a paper at the conference on road safety May 6, 2010 in Paris: PRAC 2010
Risk Prevention and Save The Conduct, Session 1 Characterization of road risk vs. infrastructure
« Evaluation du risque routier pour l’aide à la conduite ou le diagnostic de l’infrastructure », Johann Brunet, Pierre Da Silva Dias, Gérard Yahiaoui, PRAC 2010, Mai 2010, Paris.

The work that led to this publication were integrated in the available product SafetyNex. This means that by construction, the risk estimated by SafetyNex is correlated to the accident. This is true by construction, and NEXYAD conducted tests on roads, downtown, on motorways in urban areas, etc … and was able to validate this result.

PRINCIPLE OF SafetyNex V2.1

SafetyNet is a knowledge based system (expert system) which applies rules of the experts of the equipment.
These rules are stored in a rules data base in a mathematical form that can adapt to gradual actual characteristics of the infrastructure.

Required inputs are :
. the navigation map and the GPS: To examine the shape and type of the infrastructure located downstream of the vehicle (turns with their radius of curvature, points of interest like pedestrian crossing, crossroads, etc …)
. the instantaneous vehicle speed

From these two inputs, SafetyNex evaluates, by applying the rules, the adequacy of the driving speed of the vehicle to difficulty and danger of infrastructure.

A sporty driver accelerating hard, braking hard, but passing dangerous places at low speed will be scored with a low risk.
A quiet driver that passes through a stop road sing at 30 km / h without braking will be scored with a high risk.
A brutal braking cannot be considered as « bad driving » if it is necessary to avoid an accident …

We see then, that SafetyNex risk estimation is not correlated with the absolute value of acceleration, but with ACTUAL speed adaptation to difficulty and danger of the infrastructure, in real time.

Additional inputs (optional) are already scheduled, and can afford to modulate the estimated risk to increase acuracy of SafetyNex :
. grip (if one has a sensor to connect to the input provided for the purpose of SafetyNex)
. weather report (if one has the temporal and spatial information)
. atmospheric visibility (if one has adequate measure: example: a camera and the measuring module of atmospheric visibility : VisiNex)
. distance to potential obstacles (if it has an adequate sensor : eg radar, lidar, or camera with RoadNex ObstaNex modules)
. a driver distraction factor (if the driver is observed with a camera and / or if one monitors the activity of mobile phone, etc …)

All these additional inputs are already ready to be used by SafetyNex but of course, they increase the cost of deployment, involving sensors (camera, …) and additional computing power before getting in SafetyNex to process signals and images from the optional sensors.

Using SafetyNex V2.1 with only the required inputs already allows a very high correlation of the estimated risk with the accident. We recommend to implement this version, already infinitely more effective than any other onboard measurements.
The interest of SafetyNex is that the future is already assured: Moore’s Law by rapidly lowering the cost of electronics and embedded computing, SafetyNex is ready to process the additional inputs, when users want to integrate cameras and sensors.

TYPICAL USES OF SafetyNet V2.1

. Insurance Companies:

– Pay how you drive
– Predictive modeling of bonus malus: the same accident under the same conditions does not lead to the same conclusions based on accumulated historical and recording the last seconds risk SafetyNex
– Generation of a dumb risk variable, correlated to the accident, to help actuaries refine pricing (big data)

. Fleet managers

. Automotive equipment suppliers:

– Alarm on risk
– Intelligent Navigation able to advise the driver

. Engineers and researchers from autonomous vehicle:

– Driving Quality Assessment generated by the robot

CONCLUSION

Embedded estimation of road risk of accident is now a problem completely solved by a product available for deployment, SafetyNex.
SafetyNex is deployable at Low cost on:
. mobile phones
. electronic device of a Automotive Tier 1 supplier (without plugging the OBD).

And SafetyNex already planned to integrate (once the cost is acceptable) grip sensors and cameras (for example) to estimate traffic and atmospheric visibility, as well as information such as weather and driver distraction.

All of these are already processed by SafetyNex rules based system, so that the tool can quickly evoluate with each decrease in the cost of sensor elements and cost of computing power needed to compute sensors outputs.

To deploy SafetyNex, contact NEXYAD: Olivier BENEL obenel@nexyad.net +33 1 39 04 13 60

Onboard road safety/risk Measurement correlated to accidents



Onboard road safety/risk Measurement correlated to accidents :
How to use SafetyNex V2.1 for Insurance applications, and for
Automotive applications (ADAS & autonomous vehicle)

by NEXYAD


INTRODUCTION: Description of 2.1 SafetyNex

SafetyNex is a software module proposed by the French company NEXYAD. This module aims to match the driving style (acceleration, vehicle speed) with the danger characteristics of infrastructure.

SafetyNex development started in 2001 and benefited from three national collaborative research programs (PREDIT and FUI) that allowed NEXYAD modeling expertise of road equipment notation accident-prone infrastructure.

Indeed, the accident-prone nature of a local infrastructure, cannot be deduced from statistical studies on this local element, for the simple reason that accidents are rare events.A driver has one accident every 70 000 km.

To investigate the accident, the experts of the equipment mainly use two methods:
. aggregated statistics at national and European level : it provides large numbers of accidents and thus make statistics relevant. But heterogeneous infrastructure through Europe makes it difficult to project results on a local infrastructure that has its own characteristics, sometimes far from the average characteristic in France or Europe.
. the observation of “near misses” or « almost accident » as they are numerous : most potential accidents can be nearly avoided by drivers. Experts of infrastructure developed observatories for those danger situations and it brings useful information.

From these elements, the experts of the infrastructure have published a set of rules for predicting accidents, based on characteristics, the accident-prone characters of a piece of infrastructure.
For example, a bend may be accident-prone if its radius greatly shortens in its middle (curve which closes), but a “normal” curve may become dangerous if it comes after a long distance of straight line (this is called “break out on the pathway “).

NEXYAD integrated all these rules in SafetyNex and has made numerous tests on real world to validate the efficiency of scoring danger.

SafetyNex V2.1 reads on-board navigation map that gives infrastructure characteristics , downstream of the vehicle, and then SafetyNex scores the relevancy of the driving style, knowing the shape of the road ahead and other important things (pedestrian pathway, …).

Note: in a higher version (already being tested), SafetyNex may also reflect the presence of other users on the road (cars, trucks, bicycles, motorcycles, pedestrians …) by coupling it to RoadNex (road detection by camera), and ObstaNex (obstacles detection by camera).
But this version will require to have appropriate computing power to process videos. The Moore law lets us think i twill be easy and cheap in 2 or 3 years.
For now, we think that adaptation of the driving type with infrastructure characteristics meets a real issue and SafetyNex V2.1 is the only available (and for sale) module in the world for performing this function.

The output computed by SafetyNex is the road safety risk, between 0 and 100%, at every moment.

It is possible to use SafetyNex in real time to alert the driver.
It also may be used off-line, aggregating the risk : SafetyNex used to complete big data with revelant variables to study the road safety risk, in a statistical way.

SafetyNex is available in three types of running environments:
. PC under Windows or Linux
. Electronic device of an Automotive Tier One Company, for the new vehicles and aftermarket
. smartphones


SafetyNex V2.1 FOR USE OF INSURANCE

Insurance Companies have several ways to use SafetyNex V2.1:

. free distribution of the SafetyNex App for smartphones to all their customers :
In this case, the business model is to seek partners who want to reduce their cost of acquiring customers online.
In fact, when you divide the advertising budget of a major retailer (Amazon, Fnac, Darty, …) by the number of purchases, there are about 30 euros (cost of a customer).
The idea of NEXYAD then is to propose a serious game that “gives” points to drivers who behave well.
These points are converted into “coupons” with one or more distributors. The drivers will go on the website in order to validate coupons by purchasing products. In doing so (spotted digitally with flash code …), the distributor will give back 15 euros : 7,5 euros for the cupons, and 7,5 euros for the Insurance Company that distributed the NEXYAD App to their millions of customers. The insurer therefore makes money and share revenue with NEXYAD and its technology partners.

This solution is particularly interesting for several reasons:
. the insurance company earns money directly on millions of purchases.
. drivers do their best to earn coupons, and therefore change their driving behavior to achieve it.
The insurer therefore modifies in a sustainable way the driving style, and contributes to the decline in the number of accidents. The Communications Department of the the Insurance company may use this fact for communicating it to the public.
. the largest distributors lower their customers acquisition costs and they can then lower their advertising budget
. the driver improves self safety, and is able to purchase more.
. distribution in an electronic device :
The electronic device has the advantage of being still operational without driver intervention.
This solution is particularly interesting for business fleets, and allows to quickly and efficiently initiate a type of pricing system “pay how you drive” that may be seen as an extension of the bonus / malus system, but with a predictive power.
. constitution of big data for actuaries:
Risk can be recorded onboard, or in aggregate, giving statisticians a new variable for more accuracy on pricing.


SafetyNex V2.1 FOR USE IN ADAS AND AUTONOMOUS CAR APPLICATIONS

The road safety risk measurement is of course interesting for automotive applications :
. SafetyNex read the shape of infrastructure downstream of the vehicle (electronic horizon), and can therefore help to choose which types of sensors are relevant.
. SafetyNex can estimate the maximum distance targetable by sensors (radar, camera, …) depending on the shape of the infrastructure (turn, climb, …)
. During a delegation of driving, the robot drives the vehicle and then SafetyNex V2.1 can estimate the road safety related to the automatic driving.

The road safety score can be used in several ways:
. Off-line: the engineers who design and develop driving delegation system uses the risk score of SafetyNex V2.1 as a feedback, and try to minimize it by successive tests.
. On-line: the risk score is used by the decision-making system to generate actions that lead to the lowest possible risk.


CONCLUSION

SafetyNex V2.1 is now available and NEXYAD is currently working on deployment opportunities worldwide at the beginning of 2016.
This module is unique and has a direct effect, if properly used, on road safety.

For more information: sales@nexyad.net


DEMO WITH SOUND IN URBAN TRAFFIC

Put the sound on for this demo with vocal explanations :