The increased use of in-vehicle entertainment and smart phones (texting, talking, music, videos) increases the level of distraction of drivers and introduce new challenges for safety on the road. But, it is believed that mobile phones can also help improve road safety by sensing, sharing, and providing feedback to fellow drivers. Three first order, safety factors contribute to safety on the road: the driver, the vehicle, and the road. Mobile Life Guard, patent pending, includes all these categories in a comprehensive product. The proposed product involves the interaction between a mobile smartphone and its sensors, and an OBD-II device to assess current driver behavior and vehicle data. The Mobile Life Guard (MLG) system enables a suite of capabilities for safe information transfer on driver, vehicle, environment and traffic conditions in a vehicle-to-operator and vehicle-to-vehicle mode using minimum information and capabilities available on smartphones; initially the team plans to use the Android operating system in the phone and IBDII port in the vehicle. Currently the team has developed several multi-dimensional safety scores quantifying driving behavior and road conditions. The proposed product seeks to enable some of these applications with softer timeliness requirements (e.g., 'slow traffic ahead' or 'stranded vehicle ahead' warnings) through smartphones -- without the need to deploy in-vehicle infrastructure. As consumers drive around, the phone can sense and share the driving profile, vehicle functions, and infrastructure conditions (e.g., road, weather) with nearby drivers. In particular, previous research resulted on techniques on how the road conditions and hazards can be communicated by the cell phone to the neighboring drivers (e.g., tell the driver behind that slowing down now because of a speed bump). Based on the deployment of various smartphone applications, while it is relatively easy to have users download an application, it is difficult to sustain the interest in running the application over a long period of time and share the data. A primary goal of the proposed I-Corps project is to identify the subsets of the capabilities that initially have the highest potential for market development and penetration. Initial target customer groups are elderly and teenage drivers. I-Corps team plans to receive feedback directly with: i) transportation industry partners, ii) representatives from Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) and iii) first-tier system suppliers that provide systems for vehicle manufacturers.
The introduction of new in-vehicle audio and visual technologies (open APIs), access to vehicle information through OBDII and multiple sensors in smart phones creates sea-level opportunities for improving the safety on the road. The team plans to use a test bed of vehicles and mobile phones to effectively and accurately measure driver behavior and identify possible improvements. In summary, the intellectual merit components are: i) Real-time driver state modeling using mobile phones and OBDII, ii) Real-time unambiguous notifications and alerts to the neighboring vehicles iii) Real-time guidance to the driver for optimal fuel consumption, energy-efficient localization, and speed tracking, iv) Proactively predicting information about vehicle-condition, road-condition, hazards and construction, and finally v) Performance analysis and new metrics for driver-in-the-loop. To achieve the above objectives, the proposed product calls for interdisciplinary work among computer science, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, electrical engineering, neuroscience and communication studies.
I-Corps: Mobile Life Guard Final Report The increased use of in-vehicle entertainment and smart phones (texting, talking, music, videos) increases the level of distraction of drivers and introduce new challenges for safety on the road. But, it is believed that mobile phones can also help improve road safety by sensing, sharing, and providing feedback to fellow drivers. Three first order, safety factors contribute to safety on the road: the driver, the vehicle, and the road. Mobile Life Guard, patent pending, includes all these categories in a comprehensive product. The NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program had a vicious yet effective teaching method to understand what it really takes to transition research in a laboratory environment into the public market. The valuable Stanford and NSF personnel who contributed their knowledge in the program had a significant impact on the strategy and final status that we have achieved today. During the past six months, the Mobile Life Guard team endeavored on a number of topics ranging from Minimum Viable Product, Market Size, Customer Development, Key Partners and Customers and Market Strategy. The introduction of these topics directly influenced our teams overall idea of what it takes to develop into the market and future strategies to do so. Market Size Identifying the Mobile Life Guard’s market size is a crucial part of developing a business plan. For determining our market size, we identified our available markets as well as market penetration size. We used customer development tools such as personal interviews, personal surveys as well as electronic surveys to help identify these numbers. We initially surveyed potential markets and identified our minimum total available market (TAM) and served available market (SAM) (TAM) as 50 million users which spawns from a total of 200 million licensed drivers and an estimated 84.5 million smartphone users. After interviews and surveys, we had evidence for a 50% market penetration. Minimum Viable Product The initial idea of Mobile Life Guard incorporated many different aspects of driving including the driver, vehicle and the road. Some of the features that were capable might not transition as well from research to market as well as might not be necessary to the user. Distinguishing which features had greater effectiveness as well as importance to the user was essential. During our findings, we found focusing our product around a mobile application adopted some of the characteristics associated with smartphones such as low cost and a "premium" cost structure. Customer Development Customer development is an everlasting process which continuously updates and evolves into new customers. This idea is important because pivoting can occur at any time during the updating process and obtaining new customers is what will keep Mobile Life Guard thriving during transition times. During out search for customers and partners, we found many who were willing to use Mobile Life Guard for different reasons. There were also alternative motives which reflected to a business standpoint. It was for this reason that our partners also became our customers. It was with this idea which attracted these companies toward Mobile Life Guard in the case where it could solve problem simultaneously. Competition With the results of our competition search, we realized that we were entering a new market, but resegmenting an existing market. Mobile Life Guard was transitioning the telematics devices currently on the market from a simple device to more complex.
