Voluntary Solutions Don’t Work
To date, many solutions are voluntary – a person downloads an app to their phone to prevent texting while driving, or alternately takes a pledge to achieve the same goal. Texting is addictive. These solutions don’t work…the addiction is too strong. NHTSA statistics show no significant reduction in distracted driving fatalities.
Effective solutions must be mandatory – solutions that Drivers cannot bypass or avoid.
Previous Technology Solutions Don’t Work
All previous solutions described in patent applications require new phones or new cars, or both. Our SafeTexting solutions are different. They work with existing phones, cars, and cellular hardware infrastructure, and therefore can be implemented as soon as the necessary software is in place at the service providers and the App is ready.
The SafeTexting App
The SafeTexting App uses local communication in the immediate vicinity of a moving phone to determine that a cell phone is in a moving vehicle. It also determines when two or more phones are in the same vehicle. If it only detects a single phone in a vehicle, texting is disabled for that phone until it drops below a velocity threshold for a set amount of time. If the system detects multiple phones in the same vehicle, it looks for one of the phones to be registered as a Driver Phone. The Driver Phone is disabled for texting, and the other phones in the vehicle are allowed to text. So, if a driver wants his passengers to text, they register their phone – typically a 1-button push or by voice activation. Otherwise, no one in the moving vehicle can text.
Phone Proximity Determination
The SafeTexting App use one or both of two methods to determine that two phones are it he same vehicle.
- Local comparison of GPS locatons, where phones communicate locally and compare their GPS locations. Note that locations are not transmitted outside of the immediate vicinity and therefore phones are not tracked. GPS data is time-stamped, and if two phones have the same locations at the same points in time, and their movement rates track each other, then they are in the same vehicle.
- Known Acquaintencance Validation