U.S. traffic fatalities are spiking for the first time in 50 years, and Agero Inc., of Medford, Mass., is using some of Amazon Web Services’ latest offerings to try to improve driver safety.
Last year saw the highest one-year percentage increase in traffic deaths in 50 years (8 percent), a trend that is increasing this year, Agero said in a news release. The company is using AWS’s new Pinpoint service, a mobile marketing analytics feature that helps app makers run targeted push notification campaigns, in a new, free smartphone app called MileUp.
MileUp, set to become generally available in January, uses game mechanisms to rewards drivers for sharing driving data. It also uses the combination of the smartphone’s accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope and GPS to determine whether there’s been a crash and to help predict whether a crash is impending.
“We we are continuing to refine and validate the accuracy of our algorithms against real world driving data,” said Raj Behara, senior director of Agero’s digtal products and platforms, in an email. “Based on the simulated crash-test data we have collected, our algorithms perform at a prediction rate of over 98 percent.”
The hope is that such data can help cut the average EMS notification time to less than 30 seconds, from the current average time of three minutes (in urban areas) to seven minutes (in rural areas). Cutting the notification time to 30 seconds would save up to 3,000 lives per year, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Agero said it was able to rapidly build the gamification engine in MileUp from scratch using AWS. It uses Pinpoint for MileUp’s campaign management, user segmentation and points notifications.
“Pinpoint helps customers understand their customers’ behavior, define who to target, determine what messages to send, schedule the best time to deliver the message, and then track the results of their campaign,” said Simon Poile, general manager of AWS messaging and targeting, in the release. “As an early user, Agero has been able to use the technology in a highly complex use such as cloud-based mobile accident detection through MileUp.”
Agero’s cloud-based crash-detection algorithms also use several other AWS services, including Cognito for authorization, the Aurora database for persistence, Lambda for some computing functions and the API gateway for feature access.
A preview version of MileUp is now available in the App Store and on Google Play in the U.S. only.
