Camera Health 2.0: The Secret to Scaling Video Telematics Successfully

Video telematics market is in a great place right now – there is a lot of demand from fleets and as in any great market, fleets have a lot of choice. Telematics service providers (TSPs) who have integrated video in their offerings are the best placed to make the most of this demand as fleets appreciate having all the insights and information they need in one place.

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Given that the video telematics penetration even in the US is in the single-digit percentages, this promises to be a high-value segment with significant growth for many years to come.

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While selecting video telematics technology partners, TSPs pay a lot of attention to the dash camera hardware, the cost, the video telematics features, whether there is AI, how accurate it is, etc. Some even look into whether the technology partner’s cloud architecture is truly scalable.

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One thing that often gets overlooked is how easy it is to support the installed base of cameras as the number of cameras begin to scale. Even with a 1000 cameras in the field, one can start appreciating the magnitude of this task – as it goes to 10,000, onward to 50,000 – unless this was planned well, the whole user experience begins to unravel – for the end user fleet as well as for the TSP customer support. Why does this happen? As the number of cameras deployed scales, customer support teams often struggle to keep up with the number of calls resulting in a poor user experience.

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The solution to this problem is two-fold:

• Leverage technology by having the equivalent of predictive diagnostics for cameras – the goal is to raise alerts before something goes completely wrong
• Have a user-friendly camera health status which fleets can themselves monitor – if there is anything that needs attention, fleets are notified so that they can address the issue

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Figure-1 shows the camera health tab of the LightMetrics fleet dashboard.

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Consider this fleet with 166 cameras. By accessing the diagnostics tab on the panel, the fleet manager gets a snapshot of the camera health for the entire fleet. Key information that is available at a glance in this view includes:

• Green Amber Red categorization makes it easy for the fleet manager if there is anything alarming or if things are under control – too many cameras in the red group will be a cause for concern.
• Cameras tagged as Green are those that are working as expected – no attention is needed from the fleet manager.
• Cameras tagged as Amber are those where a minor issue is detected but the camera continues to function and it is not a critical issue. For e.g., if a camera is not mounted correctly and that is causing the AI to perform suboptimally, it will show up in Amber. If a camera uploaded a significantly higher amount of data in a day compared to the average, this can show up in Amber.
• Cameras tagged as Red are those that need immediate attention. It usually involves something very critical such as a camera unable to write video successfully to memory or a particular camera being offline for an extended period which can suggest issues with its LTE connection.
• Cameras tagged as Gray are those which are either not installed yet on vehicles or the cameras have not been online in a significant time.
• Cameras tagged as a particular color can be seen selecting the appropriate status as a filter.

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Knowing that a camera is flagged as Amber or Red is of little help unless one knows what are the next steps. Clicking on the Action button opens a short report of why a camera is amber or red and what the suggested next steps are.

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By eliminating the guesswork out of the equation and telling the fleet manager what is the best course of action, the new Camera Health 2.0 feature from LightMetrics is truly actionable from a fleet’s perspective.

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Issues like a power cut while moving, camera mounting position are things that a fleet can handle themselves. There could be topics for which the fleet has to get in touch with the TSP. Knowing what is going on is a big first step toward resolution and Camera Health 2.0 makes things very transparent.

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With a lot of topics being able to be addressed by the fleet, this is a win-win for the fleet as well as the TSP (whose support team is no longer loaded with these queries).

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Camera Health is just one of the many key topics that LightMetrics is investing a lot on – as a company that works with partners and does not work with fleets directly, we are all in on helping our TSP partners successfully scale video telematics in the market with minimum effort. Stay tuned for more such tools for TSPs that LightMetrics is working on – these will be as important as the video telematics functionality itself is from a scaling perspective.

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LightMetrics has released this feature in beta for all their partners – this will be available at a TSP level to start with, and then will be made available, optionally, at a fleet level. If you wish to learn more about LightMetrics and the RideView video telematics platform, please drop a note to info@lightmetrics.co.