Telefónica I+D introduces an app to encourage good driving habits and road safety – Drivies

• Drivies is an app, available on Android and iOS, which encourages good driving habits and road safety, combining the principles of gamification with the latest monitoring technology.
• This application, a first in Spain, can also be used by good drivers to obtain better car insurance prices.

Madrid, 16-7-2015 — /EuropaWire/ — CEO of Telefónica I+D (TID), David del Val and Mª del Mar Cogollos, Director of the Spanish Association for the Study of Spinal Cord Injury (AESLEME), have launched Drivies, an application which uses the capabilities and sensors of mobile phones to analyse driving habits in order to provide drivers with information on how to improve the handling of their vehicles.  Additional benefits include petrol savings and better deals on car insurance.

The app, available free of charge on the most recent iOS and Android smartphones and created using TID technology, detects speeding, distractions due to the use of mobile phones while at the wheel and abrupt driving behaviours (acceleration and braking). It also helps users drive more efficiently from the point of view of petrol consumption.

“Drivies has been entirely developed at Telefónica and all its innovations are patented by Telefónica I+D”, explained David del Val. “This initiative forms part of our collaboration with Telefónica Insurance, aimed at innovation in the insurance world. The company has also used the “lean startup” work methodology when creating this application, thereby enabling the tool to be launched in just four months”.

Moreover, with Drivies, Telefónica furthers its objective of making technology and innovation available to everyone, in order to promote better quality of life and encourage positive growth in the community. In this sense, Mª del Mar Cogollos added that “given that, with regard to road safety in both Spain and other European countries, we are seeing how the downward trend in the number of deaths on the roads is slowing, we should welcome and support any tool which helps to reverse this state of affairs. We should not neglect the reinforcement of control measures and, above all, we must include, once and for all, road safety education in the school curriculum. These are well-known steps with proven results, but we should also embrace initiatives adapted to society’s new lifestyle and form of communication by means of the latest technological trends, using them for the vital task of putting an end to traffic accidents. We therefore hope that the use of this application spreads and increases awareness of what each of us does badly at the wheel and, above all, how each of us can improve, because road safety is everyone’s business”.

After each drive, Drivies submits a detailed report of the journey, indicating the places where there have been driving incidents (speeding, distractions, etc.) on a map.  A dashboard on the Drivies  page uses simple happy or sad icons to highlight good or bad driving, safest journeys and those which have seen the most incidents for ease.

In addition, Drivies offers insurance discounts for good drivers. To do so, users accumulate points whenever their driving is good, which can be redeemed when taking out insurance. The application compares the rates of different insurance companies and offers users the best price. Drivies guarantees the privacy of the user’s driving data and only shares information when the user authorizes it to do so when requesting an insurance quotation.

Improving road safety by means of technology

1,688 fatalities were registered in Spain in 2014, eight more than in 2013, according to the DGT (General Traffic Directorate), following 11 years of falling numbers. With Drivies, both Telefónica I+D and AESLEME seek to incorporate the advantages of the new mobile technologies into road safety, thereby reducing the number of tragedies on the road.

In a pilot scheme conducted prior to the launch with 136 users, 55% of the drivers improved their driving statistics. There were an average of 8 incidents per hundred kilometres driven in the said scheme, each of which poses a potential risk to the driver.

Drivies is available in the Apple and Android app stores and can be downloaded from the links on the application web page: http://driviesapp.com/

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Telefónica I+D introduces an app to encourage good driving habits and road safety – Drivies