How Location Intelligence can play a critical role in ensuring safer driving experiences

According to National Crime Records Bureau’s data, a total of 4,37,396 road accidents were recorded in India in 2019. There are several reasons for these accidents and one of them is poorly maintained roads. Sometimes it becomes difficult for drives to determine the depth of small puddles due to water logging on the roads, potholes and unmarked speed breakers among other things. As a result, people are constantly looking for solutions to help make driving a safer experience and reduce risks due to the aforementioned issues.

To address this issue, HERE Technologies and INTENTS MOBI have partnered to develop a technology solution – Intents Go – that will help address the rising road accidents and save thousands of lives that are lost due to speed breakers and potholes on Indian roads.  A user who downloads the app will be alerted of potholes, speed breakers, water logging, landslides, etc., on a real time basis, as they drive through. The solution will also offer real-time traffic data that identifies traffic congestion areas and its reasons by delivering high-quality flow and incident content every minute. The app uses activity detection to determine if a user is driving and can alert users even in the background, ensuring it doesn’t compete with any navigation technology directly.

In a detailed interview with Express Computer, Rohit Kaushik, Head – Product Portfolio Operations, South Asia, HERE Technologies, shares with us the importance of location intelligence for ensuring safer driving

Some edited excerpts:

Specific to India, can you explain the importance of location intelligence for ensuring safer driving experiences?

As you are aware India is one of the busiest countries in the world in terms of road traffic. In 2019, there were almost three million new passenger vehicle registrations in the country. The Indian road network, spanning over six million kilometers, carried almost 90% of the country’s passenger traffic and about 65% of the goods. With the rapid increase in the number of cars and the mercilessly congested Indian roads, road safety has turned into a factor of utmost importance for the country’s citizens. On the other side India accounts for about five hundred thousand road accident annually and one of the highest in the world in which about 1.5 lakh fatalities and another 3 lakh become incapacitated. Major causes of road accidents in India are due to over speeding, rapid urbanization, distracted drivers, uneven road conditions (potholes and rough patches), influence of drugs or alcohol and failure to wear seatbelts or helmets.

Location Intelligence plays a critical role in ensuring safer driving experiences and has become an integral part of our lives. This is one of the reasons that most of the companies in India from automotive, transport and logistics, ride hailing, food delivery, etc. leverage location intelligence data for their own benefits and for their customers.

I will take an example specially in the case of transport and logistic sector, for several years driver shortages across the transportation industry remained a challenge, retention of safe and experienced drivers will continue to be of paramount importance.

As such, fleet managers that want to remain competitive will need to focus closely on delivering high levels of driver safety and satisfaction. As transportation companies are liable for their trucks on the road, fleet managers are highly motivated to take steps that help reduce the possibility of accidents from occurring. In this scenario location intelligence plays two critical driver safety roles: it powers applications that monitor truck driver behavior; and it enables the analysis needed to efficiently manage and coach drivers about road safety. Location intelligence can help improve understanding of – and compliance with – posted speed limit data; it can also help to understand what the appropriate driver action is when taking elements such as traffic, weather conditions and other road legal and physical restrictions into account.
Rich, real-time location data can mean the difference between a costly and life-threatening accident and a driver empowered with vital knowledge who can maintain a brand’s trustworthiness through safe, timely and efficient driving.

By enabling fleet applications to create driver safety and analysis features, location intelligence plays a critical role in helping to analyze driver behavior in real time. It can also help fleet managers identify drivers who exceed performance requirements and who can then be incentivized to stay with the company.

HERE Technologies and INTENTS MOBI have partnered to develop a technology solution – Intents Go – that will help address the rising road accidents. Is this technology independently developed? Does it use existing resources such as Google Maps or do you offer navigation and safety as an integrated experience?

This application is a classic example of innovation and expertise. Intents Go is developed by Intents Mobi team and the same is powered by selected HERE offerings such as Routing, Traffic Layer, Geocoding, Places and many others. The app is available absolutely free for users to download from Google Play store and very soon it will be available in iOS store.

Have you partnered with or looking to partner with any government authority or body for making sure that the awareness and reach of the app is much more? What are some of the initiatives planned for increasing awareness?

HERE has been working with businesses and governments during COVID 19. HERE collaborated with UNL to provide a solution – Human Care App which provides infrastructure for a tech-driven shift to a new normal by accelerating the information flow and collaboration between people, governments, NGOs and businesses to co-create safer public environments powered by location and data. This was put together under the #teach4good foundation, where in users could self-monitor and communicate their symptoms with local, governments and business to bring transparency to new and developing case based on geolocation. It would help provide information about important hubs like hospitals, Pop-Clinics and relief centres to receive help within proximity of their location. We will continue to work with government bodies in India to address road safety challenges with our offerings.