The client operates around 100,000 vehicles as part of its global logistics service. They estimated around 20 deaths per year are caused by driver inattention (including tiredness) and that each death has a direct cost of around $5m USD, putting aside the emotional impact on the families of those involved. In addition to deaths, there were accidents into the 100’s which at times carried a higher direct cost given need to provide “for life” support.

As part of an innovation discovery engagement, we were asked to see if any Fujitsu technology could be brought to play, to reduce this impact.

In my role as Global Offerings Lead, I had a direct connection to Fujitsu’s innovation labs in Japan. On one visit I noticed they had developed a wearable “collar” that could be used to measure attention and warn when levels of inattention were problematic or critical. This included the ability to “learn” the specific characteristics of the user over a period of time for improved accuracy. It gathered various biometrics which were analysed partially on the device and partially on a BlueTooth connected mobile phone. However, it was all in Japanese, there was no external connectivity or transmission of data and as such, it wasn’t ready for market.

Over a 6 month period, I and a small UK-based technical team worked with the product owners in Japan to open up the architecture (provide an API) so we could develop our own device-agnostic mobile application. This was then connected to a Microsoft Azure cloud platform to provide device management and organisation-wide analytics to generate the missing insight into why drivers have accidents. This included looking at factors such as operator health, vehicle type, route, weather conditions and time of day. The customer was closely involved in helping to define the solution.

A 50 user pilot was rolled out across several European countries. We had some issues with user adoption (the customer was initially insistent on a train the trainer approach) but these were resolved and the pilot was deemed a success by the customer. They are currently looking at a 5,000 device rollout to further gauge the benefits to the business. This is being provided via a subscription model which includes the device, user enablement, device management and operational analytics dashboards, all wrapped in a service package (helpdesk, break/fix etc.)