A dongle to track your driving behaviour
Manama : The idea of preventing traffic accidents has fascinated Faheem Gill, an innovator and technopreneur who has come up with a device to help motorists become better drivers.
By collecting data about their driving habits, the device can tell how good or bad of a driver the user is and how they can improve their driving.
It uses telematic technology to monitor driving habits with the aim of preventing accidents. The device, called Dashroad, which can be installed in any car manufactured since 1996, has an installation time of 90 seconds.
Once installed it will begin collecting data such as the speed at which the user drives, how ‘harsh’ his/her acceleration is, harshness of breaking and other driving patterns to help judge a driver. With the technology he hopes to change the driving behaviour of millions, he told DT News.
According to him, Dashroad is the world’s most advanced vehicle-tracking dongle.
“Dashroad measures the driver’s behaviour and allows them to identify how they can become better drivers. It is a dongle that we plug into the car, the device stays there while you are driving the car. It will send information to the cloud servers,” he said.
Another useful feature is that if the driver crashes his car, the device will send a notification to his/her family.
“The device will send a notification right away along with information about how severe the accident was, how fast they were driving when the accident happened. The loved one will receive the notification to their mobile phone regardless of where they are in the world.”
The device can also be used to study time of the day and circumstances at which road users are likely to drive aggressively.
In a recent study using Dash-road, it was found that drivers in Dubai tend to drive more aggressively during evenings of Ramadan.
“Over-speeding was happening more from 8pm to 12am during Ramadan and during the other days it was happening more uniformly from 3am to 3pm,” he said. He said that he and his team are working on more ways to help prevent accidents.
“With the help of the data collected we can give alerts to drivers before they get on the road. With Dashroard we can study the times of the day when the road users are likely to drive aggressively, so we can educate and update the user about this. We are exploring accident prevention techniques by studying the correlation between driving patterns and accidents.”
Gill, who is based in Dubai and was in Bahrain on a business trip, said he hopes to expand to Bahrain in the near future. “Those in Bahrain can already buy this product via amazon.com but we are interested in marketing the product in Bahrain by teaming up with an investor here,” he said.
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