LightMetrics in 2023 – A look ahead

2022 was a milestone year for LightMetrics in many ways. We  tripled our installed base of cameras, and established a strong and growing presence across all 6 continents. This stands on top of the foundation of progress we made across engineering, product development, customer relationships and much more, but that is not the focus of this article. At its essence, 2022 for us was less about growth itself per se, but in setting the stage for LightMetrics to achieve its true potential in 2023 and beyond.

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The proverbial stage being set, let’s look at 2023 through the lens of our key objectives, and how we plan to achieve them:

• Better understanding of driving behavior
• Enhancing user experience across the board
• Increasing the accessibility of advanced video telematics

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These objectives will guide the evolution and advancement of RideView this year, with growth and other attendant benefits flowing directly from the progress we make across each of these. Let’s take a closer look.

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Better understanding of driving behavior:

Video telematics as a tool for fleets to improve safety outcomes is effective only when it is able to understand driving behavior and associated risk accurately and comprehensively. The ‘how’ of better driving behavior understanding lies with the AI based real-time incident detection engines that are at the core of the in-cabin experience with RideView.

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Our roadmap for 2023 covers both improvements and enhancements to existing features, as well as increasing the coverage of risky behaviors detected. Improvements to existing DMS algorithms for the detection of cellphone-usage and driver fatigue will continue to be rolled out over the course of the year, along with the detection of other cues that indicate that the driver’s attention has drifted away from the task at hand. This will be augmented by the detection of other instances of non-compliance, like not wearing a seat-belt when driving. For end-users we will also provide a unified and more intuitive framework for configuring DMS incidents based on established global standards.

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Improvements to existing ADAS algorithms will be delivered throughout the year, leveraging data and learnings from a global installed base of tens of thousands of vehicles. This includes significant updates to lane drift detection which will also introduce user-configurable settings. Enhancing the accuracy of driver scores and event severity metrics will be a key area of focus, through the detection of context around incidents, and a recognition of instances where a driver exhibits positive behaviors.

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Enhancing user experience across the board:

Advanced video telematics can deliver on its promise of a significant reduction in accidents and associated costs for fleets when a fleet manager, safety director or coach is able to easily detect behaviors that need correction, and seamlessly execute different workflows in reaction to different events.

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To that end, we have planned far reaching improvements to the user-experience for all the personas that interact with the RideView platform. It starts with fundamental improvements in the response times for our most commonly used APIs, hand-in-hand with the co-location of compute and storage infrastructure across different geographies. The experience of users who use the RideView fleet portal will also change significantly, starting with a more intuitive and flexible way to request on-demand video (DVR). The entire workflow for automatic driver identification using face recognition and the subsequent tagging of trips, will also become easier.

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This will also be the year when our fleet portal becomes enterprise-ready, with support for grouping and tagging of assets and drivers that allow for easier management of enterprise fleets with thousands of vehicles. On the same theme, our driver coaching workflow will also see a significant update, including the creation of new user personas and access controls based on roles and permissions. Fleet managers will also be able to initiate key workflows outside the fleet portal, based on configurable notifications that land in their inbox.

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Helping TSPs better monitor and manage their installed base of devices will continue to be a focus area. We will give fleets more visibility into device health, letting them diagnose and solve the most common issues themselves. TSP support personnel will get access to enhanced device health reporting, as well as dedicated notifications intimating them of anomalies. We will also launch an improved device provisioning workflow, helping TSPs optimize their operations by reducing the lag between usage and service activation.

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Increasing the accessibility of advanced video telematics:

LightMetrics occupies a unique position in the video telematics industry due to our efforts to democratize the access of advanced video telematics. Along with our partner TSPs we have demonstrated that advanced video telematics is:

• NOT just for heavy trucks or enterprise fleets only, by working on affordability and bringing enterprise level features to everyone
• NOT just for developed markets only, based on the strong demand in emerging markets.
• NOT one-size-fits-all – select the camera that makes the most sense for your fleets and your market

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We will continue on our mission to widen the access of video telematics by catering to a broader set of use cases, like enhancements to camera sleep mode that will allow fleets to remotely wake up devices when a vehicle is parked and initiate live streaming (an important security feature for emerging markets). TSPs will also get the ability to manage data consumption by rate-limiting incidents, reducing overall costs and fleet manager workloads.

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Our portfolio of supported camera hardware will increase, making it easier for TSPs globally to adopt and deploy our solutions across various fleet verticals. We will add dash cam options that increase affordability without sacrificing performance, and also support devices that provide multi-channel video recording around a vehicle, giving fleets access to a 360-degree view of any incident.

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Continuing on our efforts to ease the deployment process for TSPs, customers in Australia and New Zealand will join our US and Canadian customers in having connectivity services optionally bundled along with RideView, reducing operational overheads and time-to-market. Other key global markets will follow over the course of the year.

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For all the progress we have made in the past, we are just getting started. A large part of that is driven by the trust our customers have placed with us, in delivering the most robust and advanced safety solutions for a diverse set of fleets across the globe. The work we do together this year will deliver meaningful safety outcomes for thousands of fleets and drivers – as far as motivations go, we could not have asked for better.