Aaron Huff of Overdrive sister fleet publication CCJ on Tuesday published a report looking at the wide array of video-based coaching and monitoring systems proliferating among fleets. Such systems, looked at most recently in Overdrive in the context of fatigue detection and monitoring in last year’s “Fatigue’s Fast Track”‘ series, increasingly are providing live feedback to the driver.
Effectiveness, ultimately, is predicated on avoiding what has been something of a prevailing sentiment among truckers to date about all manner of active-feedback-type systems, whether utilizing video machine vision or not: That such accountrements piled on top of in-cab and basic truck technology might be a nuisance at best.
Increasingly, as Huff points out, providers of video systems are delivering feedback directly to the driver for self-coaching — the The Driveri Mobile Coach app from Netradyne gives drivers their own videos of recorded events for self-training purposes.As Huff raises the question of live-feedback “nudging” versus its counterproductive corollary, “nagging,” in the recent CCJ story:
Several companies have vision-based safety systems that identify risk by combining event data with live video from inward and outward-facing cameras. The systems use algorithms that find patterns in complex data sets. Exactly how these safety technologies should interact with drivers in a live environment is a matter of debate. Could giving drivers visual or audible alerts cause more problems than they prevent?
The story details several systems Overdrive readers will be familiar with from prior coverage, including those from SmartDrive, Lytx DriveCam, Bendix with the Wingman Fusion system and Netradyne. The market for similarly-focused systems is growing, however, as Huff details other providers not much covered in these pages, with devices detailed from the Samsara, Nauto and eDriving companies.
Read Huff’s full story at this link to get the bigger picture.
