Azuga, which offers commercial vehicle fleets the Azuga Fleet and Azuga FleetMobile safety products, is adding another tool to the safety arsenal of fleets. The Azuga SafetyCam AI is a dashboard-mounted camera system that integrates with the existing Azuga safety portfolio.
“SafetyCam AI is the most anticipated product we’ve developed so far,” said Ananth Rani, CEO of Azuga. “We were reducing accidents by 38% without dashcams and expect to cut accidents by half or more as more fleets adopt this technology. Experts are predicting that roughly 3 billion packages will be delivered during the holiday season. We want to protect drivers who are on the road when conditions can be less than ideal. We’re excited to offer a solution that helps drivers reach their destinations safely and helps fleet operators reduce costs.”
Azuga said that customers using its existing products, including GPS devices, have driven a 57% reduction in driving citations and a 53% reduction in wear and tear on fleet vehicles. The SafetyCam AI will build upon those numbers. It utilizes multi-sensor HD cameras in conjunction with artificial intelligence and computer vision technology to provide a livestream of the driver while alerting fleet safety managers of potentially dangerous activity such as hard braking, sharp turns, distracted driving and rapid acceleration.
The camera leverages facial recognition technology to detect when a driver is distracted or drowsy. The AI neural-learning network analyzes each driver-facing video to look for possible distraction events and provides tags to help fleets identify underlying causes of risky events, the company said.
Video is stored for 30 days. The AI feature is only available for the driver-facing portion of the camera at this time. The company explained that when a risky event like hard braking or sudden acceleration is detected, Azuga’s driver-monitoring system captures the video and sends it to Azuga’s cloud servers. The AI neural-learning network then analyzes each driver-facing video to look for possible distraction events and provides tags. The in-house risk analysts further curate the videos to make sure customers only focus on the risky events that they need to monitor.
Once those steps are completed, the SafetyCam dashboard in the Azuga Fleet web application filters the curated videos to streamline the driver coaching process. Customers can filter and search by type of distraction.
Alerts can be sent via the Azuga Fleet web application, AzugaFleetMobile or email.
Context for events is important, and Azuga will continue to provide a human layer to this to ensure drivers receive the proper coaching. The premium offering provides fleets access to Azuga’s professional risk analysts that will tag events that best illustrate risky driving behavior and prioritize them for coaching.
More than 200,000 vehicles currently use Azuga products. Its cameras capture and record:
- Event road-facing video
- Event driver-facing video
- Driver name
- Vehicle name
- Initial speed
- Final speed
Azuga offers gamification and driver reward programs, driver coaching with Azuga Coac, and a basic SafetyCam that records harsh driving events.
Click for more FreightWaves articles by Brian Straight.
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