While together telematics and outward-facing video can give a fleet manager a lot of great data to work with, there\u2019s still part of the picture missing.<\/p>\n
Take, for instance, one driver who appeared to be the best in the fleet. Based on the data points available, his performance was stellar. He was always on time, never missed work, and never got ticketed.<\/p>\n
But when the company installed smart video, which uses inward-facing cameras, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to capture instances of unsafe driver behavior, a different picture emerged. The driver was dozing off more than five times per night \u2014 while driving at highway speeds.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was suffering from sleep apnea and was a ticking time bomb for a major accident,\u201d said David Isler, CEO of FleetCam. \u201cOur customer coached him, and he got the help he needed to stay alert and safe on the road. This is just one example of using new smart video data points to get ahead of potential problems.\u201d<\/p>\n
Smart video is giving fleet managers a virtual ride-along, without weeding through endless hours of footage, and it\u2019s helping fleets become safer and more efficient. Here\u2019s how.<\/p>\n The primary uses of smart video are to improve driver safety, reduce the risk of collisions, and avoid false claims. Several other unique use cases yield fleet efficiencies. These include:<\/p>\n First things first: What exactly is \u201csmart video\u201d?<\/p>\n Smart video systems incorporate additional cameras beyond traditional dashcams, allowing fleets to see both inside and sometime around the vehicle. But beyond capturing more footage, artificial intelligence (AI) identifies specific driver behaviors and helps to pinpoint the most critical moments from that footage so fleet managers can view the parts that yield the most valuable information.<\/p>\n Sid Nair,\u00a0senior director of transport and compliance at Teletrac Navman, explained to understand smart video, you need to understand the history of video telematics. Nair said video evolved in three distinct phases: the first was pure recording, primarily used for accident reconstruction.<\/p>\n \u201cIt required you, as the driver in the truck, to know what happened at what time and then provide that information to your fleet manager to find the right video footage,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Nair called Phase II \u201caugmented intelligence video,\u201d which allowed video to stream to a back office where people evaluate it.<\/p>\n \u201cAugmented video has some triggers for events like harsh braking and flags the moment for people to look at the video stream,\u201d Nair said. \u201cIn Phase III, we evolve into smart video, which allows us to detect actual driver behavior and stitch it all together. Now we can get a 360-degree view. The smart part of it comes when you can connect the dots between looking at the road and the driver.\u201d<\/p>\n Let\u2019s say a forward-facing camera shows a car cutting off one of your drivers. The telematics device detects harsh braking. But whose fault is it? Is it the car\u2019s fault for cutting off your driver? Or was the driver looking at his phone, causing the harsh braking?<\/p>\n Inward facing cameras provide the answer by detecting the driver\u2019s exact behavior and alerting the fleet manager.<\/p>\n \u201cThe camera itself can now detect these things rather than it happening in the back office,\u201d Nair said. \u201cSmart video looks at what happened and why then flags it as needed. Fleet managers don\u2019t have to spend time going through footage.\u201d<\/p>\n Jason Palmer, COO of SmartDrive<\/a>, said smart video adds a new level of analysis that provides actionable information to both drivers and fleet managers.<\/p>\n \u201cInitially, video telematics was combining video information with breadcrumbs, such as events on a map, allowing you only to see the video and know where it was recorded. Now, video telematics allows fleets to bring in the information and integrate it with back-office workflows,\u201d Palmer said. \u201cAs opposed to less sophisticated video, which just records what\u2019s occurring, \u2018smart video\u2019 records and performs analysis at the same time, alerting the driver as to what the system is seeing, along with providing analytics to the driver\u2019s manager.\u201d<\/p>\n In addition to providing more information about driver behavior and the context of unsafe driving events, smart video also makes it easier for fleets to drill down to the information that matters most, thanks to AI and edge computing.<\/p>\n \u201cRegular video cameras\/dashcams merely record what is happening, and you typically would have to search through hours of footage to find a moment or incident that took place,\u201d said Ryan Driscoll, VP of marketing for GPS Insight. \u201cSmart cameras can isolate and transfer important moments and info for real-time notification and easy access. Smart cameras can detect, analyze, and notify management of accidents, hard braking, rapid acceleration, driver drowsiness, traffic-signal violations, stop-sign violations, tailgating, seatbelt compliance, U-turn detection, and of course speeding based on the posted speed limit.\u201d<\/p>\n While smart video does record every minute on the road, AI and edge computing analyze these moments and only notify managers about the moments that matter most.<\/p>\n \u201cSmart video uses AI and machine learning to intelligently capture and automatically classify that video data the dashcam is capturing,\u201d said Kevin Aries,\u00a0head of global product success for Verizon Connect<\/a>. \u201cNow, fleet managers can understand how severe an event is, and it helps them focus only on the relevant pieces of data so they can manage safety around their business.\u201d<\/p>\n In addition to correcting driver behavior, smart video can also be used to identify and reward the best drivers.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re capturing every minute of driving time so we can identify not only when a driver is compliant with laws and policies, but when they demonstrate exceptional driving,\u201d said Adam Kahn, president of fleet for Netradyne.<\/p>\n This is especially important when sometimes \u201cunsafe\u201d driver behaviors may be good defensive driving. Smart video is smart enough to distinguish when a behavior is truly positive or negative.<\/p>\n \u201cVideo takes telematics to another level by being able to give context and identify positive driver behaviors,\u201d Driscoll said. \u201cFor example, if a driver slams the brakes to avoid hitting a child that ran into the street to chase his ball, with regular telematics data, the driver would be dinged for hard braking, and it would negatively affect his score. With video, the AI on the camera would see that the hard braking was to avoid hitting someone so that it would give them a positive score.\u201d<\/p>\n And, perhaps most importantly, smart video can be used to assist drivers who are in trouble. \u201cThe biggest difference between video and \u2018smart video\u2019 is the ability to deliver data in real-time,\u201d said Ashim Bose, chief data scientist and VP of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data engineering for Omnitracs. \u201cA connected video device can relay information to fleet managers immediately, which can be critical if a driver is in an accident.\u201d<\/p>\n Isler said that while AI has become increasingly useful, it\u2019s also become more accessible to fleets.<\/p>\n \u201cThe price has come down significantly, and at the same time, AI has become much more powerful,\u201d he said. \u201cIn the past it would not have been possible to compute simultaneously tracking distance to the vehicle in front of the driver, checking to see if he is smoking or using a cell phone, watching his eyes through sunglasses using infrared to see if he is falling asleep, and recording five-plus channels of video in and around the vehicle. It is amazing when you stop to think about how much is happening at the same time!<\/p>\n Taking a closer look, here\u2019s how the technology behind smart video operates.<\/p>\n \u201cFirst, a sudden change in driving temperament \u2014 for example, harsh braking, rapid acceleration or unexpected lane departure triggers the camera associated with that specific sensor to turn on and capture 3-5 seconds of footage,\u201d said Will Wycks, global marketing director for Chevin. \u201cThis reveals the cause of that change.\u201d<\/p>\n How does smart video know which instances to capture? Artificial intelligence and machine learning are essential.<\/p>\n \u201cArtificial intelligence needs a lot of data to train the algorithms to work,\u201d said Michael Phillippi, VP, technology for Lytx<\/a>. \u201cWe have data from 600,000 vehicles, with events we had already classified. We then took that data, fed it into a machine, and out comes a machine algorithm. In other words, years of human judgment about what\u2019s happening in a video is fed into a machine, and then the machine can tell you in the next video what\u2019s happening. That\u2019s how it\u2019s able to find the unique moments in time that are important to fleets and drivers.\u201d<\/p>\n Thanks to AI and machine learning, smart video can remove the potential for human error or bias as well as the time-consuming processes associated with manually reviewing video.<\/p>\n \u201cVideo is data, and historically that has been left to the human\/viewer to analyze and interpret. That takes time and is based on opinion,\u201d Aries said. \u201cSmart video uses advanced technology to interpret better what\u2019s happening in those videos. Ultimately, it helps inform decision making by being able to tell the viewer what\u2019s happening in the video and how safe or unsafe an event has been. It also saves time by reducing the need to review hours of video footage and helps them identify important events.\u201d<\/p>\n Kahn said the systems that make video \u201csmart\u201d allow for real-time monitoring and improved performance over time \u2014 attributes you don\u2019t get with first-generation video telematics.<\/p>\n \u201cAnalysis is done on the device with edge computing, resulting in near real-time notification and updates. Legacy systems have a delay in that they upload the data in batches overnight, the video is scored by humans, and returned later,\u201d he said. \u201cMachine learning also enables the system to be trained for consistent precision \u2014 and continues to get better over time. Legacy video telematics relies on a human making a trained judgment.\u201d<\/p>\n Phillippi said with continuous distraction detection and cameras always trained on drivers, machine vision and artificial intelligence (MV+AI) can detect things like cell phone use, smoking, eating and drinking, seatbelt use, and camera obstruction.<\/p>\n \u201cWe use video, paired with MV+AI, to evaluate how the driver is doing and provide a scorecard associated with it. Then, we provide fleet managers with the highlight reel with the unique moments to share with drivers,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s the best of both worlds \u2014 a scorecard that tells you exactly what you were doing and when, and then some unique videos that drive home the message by showing drivers the footage. It\u2019s comprehensive visibility and good teaching moments. Fleets combine those two to drive the risk out of their fleets.\u201d<\/p>\n What does this advanced technology do for fleets? It allows them to identify driver behavior they may have never known about, were it not for the footage. Using video footage of the most critical moments of a driver\u2019s trip allows them to provide more effective driver coaching. The result is safer drivers on the road and reduced risk of collisions.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also what other drivers are doing. Smart video can help exonerate truck drivers in the case of collisions and reduce costs associated with liability.<\/p>\n \u201cThe two most important benefits are fewer accidents and improved security. Smart video provides context for driver coaching that fleet managers could not otherwise have unless they ride shotgun with all of their drivers,\u201d Driscoll said. \u201cSmart video also captures positive driver behavior and can exonerate drivers from false claims and not-at-fault accidents, which is a layer of security that businesses and drivers have never had before. The result is saved costs due to reduced accidents, insurance premiums, and costs associated with false claims.\u201d<\/p>\n Phillippi said data shows how video solutions, especially those paired with MV+AI, pay off. \u201cThe largest benefit we see straightaway is a 50% to 80% reduction in collisions,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cLarger vehicles have higher per-claim costs per vehicle, so generally, in two to three months, the return on investment pays off.\u201d<\/p>\n Aries noted that smart video builds on the results telematics solutions currently provide fleets.<\/p>\n \u201cAccording to a survey we did last year, customers that use telematics solutions saw a decrease in accidents up to 22%,\u201d Aries said. \u201cWe believe integrated video is an extra layer on that success. Video today has captured hundreds of harsh driving events that managers would never be able to see if it weren\u2019t for the video solution.\u201d<\/p>\n Above all is the added protection smart video offers drivers.<\/p>\n \u201cThe number one benefit is adding a level of safety to make sure that the driver gets home to his family at the end of his shift,\u201d Isler said.<\/p>\n \u201cSome organizations get pushback on driver-facing cameras around an invasion of privacy. Long-haul drivers even argued that, because they often sleep and eat in their trucks, it\u2019s their home and object to being watched in their home,\u201d said Ryan Driscoll, VP of marketing for GPS Insight. \u201cThat argument fell short with the California Attorney General, which concluded that the use of the cameras doesn\u2019t violate any state laws.\u201d<\/p>\n How to Overcome It:<\/strong> \u201cIt\u2019s important drivers understand how the program is benefiting him\/her and the company, how the video content is being used, etc.,\u201d said Jason Palmer, COO of SmartDrive. \u201cAlong with these issues, it\u2019s important to address any privacy concerns.\u201d<\/p>\n Once drivers experience the technology, the benefits become apparent. \u201cThe biggest challenge is probably fear of \u2018Big Brother,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cIt takes a little time and sometimes even a pilot to get drivers to understand this technology is guarding them and keeping them safe. Once they have driven with it, they understand: All it takes is driving one time while distracted or sleepy to save their life for them to be very thankful it is there.\u201d<\/p>\n Adam Kahn, president of fleet for Netradyne, agreed that once the system is in place, it can ease drivers\u2019 concerns. \u201cPeople think by just throwing a camera in a truck, magic is going to happen. It does not,\u201d said Sid Nair,\u00a0senior director of transport and compliance at Teletrac Navman. \u201cSmart video still requires a human element to make sure the technology is working for you. I\u2019ve seen many people underutilize technology when there\u2019s no one managing it. Buying a wrench doesn\u2019t fix your car problems. Someone needs to be at the helm.\u201d<\/p>\n How to Overcome It:<\/strong> \u201cSmart video solutions provide the data, but the challenge is on companies to leverage that data to have more informed conversations with drivers,\u201d said Kevin Aries,\u00a0head of global product success for Verizon Connect. \u201cThe companies have to develop the culture and conversation around safety and safe driving. That is ultimately the call to action we\u2019d have for businesses adopting these solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n When AI and machine learning are combined with effective driver coaching, fleets see a significant reduction in risky driving behaviors. Photo:\u00a0Lytx<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n by Shelley Ernst<\/a><\/p>\n Source: https:\/\/www.truckinginfo.com<\/a><\/p>\n Fleet management is the use of a set of vehicles in order to provide services to a third-party, or to perform a task for our organization, in the most efficient and productive manner with a determined level of service and cost.<\/p>\n Fleet management activities are shown in the following graph 1:<\/p>\n Graph 1: fleet management activities<\/p>\n The proposal audit analyses and assesses all fleet management activities shown in the graph 1, and its main goals are:<\/p>\n With the information obtained, we\u2019ll elaborate a report that holds the overall status of the fleet management as well as the suggestions, recommendations and the measures to take in order to cut costs and optimize the fleet management activities.<\/p>\n CLICK ON THE FOLLOWING LINK TO DOWNLOAD THE PROPOSED FLEET MANAGEMENT AUDIT:<\/p>\n Contact:<\/p>\n Jos\u00e9 Miguel Fern\u00e1ndez G\u00f3mez<\/p>\n 34 678254874<\/p>\n info@advancedfleetmanagementconsulting.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Can Video Telematics Get ‘Smarter’? Once drivers see the overarching benefits of a driver-facing or inward-facing video system, fleet managers can do a lot more to protect them from false accusations and help keep drivers and the motoring public safe on the road. Telematics can tell fleet managers a lot about how drivers are performing…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3823,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[18],"tags":[41],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/advancedfleetmanagementconsulting.com\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3821"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/advancedfleetmanagementconsulting.com\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/advancedfleetmanagementconsulting.com\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/advancedfleetmanagementconsulting.com\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/advancedfleetmanagementconsulting.com\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/advancedfleetmanagementconsulting.com\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3821\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/advancedfleetmanagementconsulting.com\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/advancedfleetmanagementconsulting.com\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/advancedfleetmanagementconsulting.com\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/advancedfleetmanagementconsulting.com\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"It\u2019s](\"https:\/\/fleetimages.bobitstudios.com\/upload\/work-truck-online\/content\/article\/2019-12\/20191204-fleetcam-ai-event-falling-asleep-screenshot-__-720x516-s.jpg\")
12 Unique\u00a0Smart Video Applications<\/h5>\n
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What is \u2018Smart\u2019 Video?<\/h5>\n
Intelligent Technology<\/h5>\n
![\"Smart](\"https:\/\/fleetimages.bobitstudios.com\/upload\/work-truck-online\/content\/article\/2019-12\/20191204-smartdrive-__-720x516-s.jpg\")
How Does Smart Video Make Fleets Smarter?<\/h5>\n
How to Handle Two Top Smart Video Challenges<\/h5>\n
Challenge #1: Driver Skepticism<\/h6>\n
\n\u201cThough video is becoming more pervasive, there is still some driver resistance at first when fleets adopt. We can quickly overcome that notion as drivers experience positive feedback and realize it\u2019s there to protect them and their fleet,\u201d he said.<\/p>\nChallenge #2: Belief in Data Alone<\/h6>\n
![\"When](\"https:\/\/fleetimages.bobitstudios.com\/upload\/work-truck-online\/content\/article\/2019-12\/20191204-driver-coaching-lytz-__-720x516-s.jpg\")
FLEET MANAGEMENT AUDIT<\/h3>\n
![\"fleet](\"http:\/\/en.advancedfleetmanagementconsulting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/grafico-AFMC-en.jpg\" "\\"fleet")
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Fleet Management Audit AFMC<\/a><\/h2>\n