Lytx, a global provider of video telematics, analytics, productivity and safety solutions for commercial, public sector and service fleets, announces new data on how its machine vision and artificial intelligence (MV+AI) powered technology – which is used to detect and alert drivers and fleets of distractions and risky behaviors in real time – has enabled fleets and empowered drivers to identify and correct significantly more risk, both inside and outside of the vehicle.
Lytx first released MV+AI in 2015 to help fleets identify risky driving behavior like unsafe following distance. The most recent enhancements, launched this past February, include inside view triggers, like cell phone use, powered by MV+AI to help solve the epidemic of distracted driving, a problem that costs approximately $175 billion a year in the United States.1 Since launching inside view triggers, over 1,500 more fleets have deployed the company's MV+AI-backed driver safety solution.
Lytx Enhanced Risk Detection Designed to Help Eradicate Distracted Driving
"While many providers claim to have AI, it is really important to ask the right questions about the quality and breadth of their offering because many providers only capture one or two specific behaviors and do so using unreliable or limited datasets," said Dave Riordan, Lytx executive vice president and general manager, enterprise business. "This can lead to a barrage of false positives that result in inaccurate data and lead to trust issues with drivers, while increasing the risk of missing the real thing. We are pleased to see so many fleets adopting our MV+AI technology, enabling them to detect and reduce cell phone use and other high-risk driving behaviors before they result in a collision – or worse."
Lytx technology is validated and backed by a large and fast-growing driving database, which grows by more than 140,000 new driving events each day, further training and improving its algorithms. This data is incorporated into a system that is able to deliver greater than 95% accuracy across 60 behaviors.
New Lytx customer Abacus Plumbing, Air Conditioning & Electrical has a fleet comprised of light-duty vehicles, including sprinter vans and pickup trucks. The fleet has deployed both the Lytx Driver Safety Program, including MV+AI-powered risk triggers, and Lytx Fleet Tracking. With both aspects of the fleet management solution together in one platform, Abacus has been able to evaluate its business from multiple angles and consider how to prioritize productivity and safety while maintaining top-notch customer service.
"Like any organization with company vehicles on the road, we have long worried about the risk associated with cell phone use," said Steve Darbonne, occupational health and safety manager at Abacus. "As a service company, our technicians are trained to give customers a courtesy call before arriving, not to mention using cell phones for alerts about job changes, reassigned tasks and directions. When deploying the new risk detection, we were able to work closely with the Lytx team to customize event categorization so we could understand better where these behaviors were actually presenting risk and how to mitigate that danger. Bringing that together with fleet tracking has been a big win for us."
Darbonne continued, "With so much data powering Lytx's technology, we initially saw a major rise in the numbers of risky driving events. Lytx MV+AI was identifying risk inside the cab that we just weren't seeing before. Now, we're experiencing significant reductions in those behaviors, as we use that awareness to show our drivers the prevalence and risk of distracted habits, while in-cab audible alerts notify them of dangerous activities as they happen so they can self-correct."
Lytx MV+AI provides accurate and timely visibility into eight high-risk behaviors that occur both on the road and in the cab. The company's MV+AI road-view triggers, launched in 2015, include rolling stop, lane departure, following distance and critical distance. Lytx released a major enhancement earlier this year, with MV+AI used to proactively detect driving behaviors including handheld device, no seatbelt, food or drink and driver smoking, illuminating significantly more risk and providing clients and drivers with new levels of awareness.
