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It can’t wait – Car Mode to the rescue

By Anon Anon posted Oct 15, 2015 09:02 AM

  

Ramblings from an Automation Mad Man
By Jerry Maldonado --VP Business Unit Strategy, Customer Lifecycle Solutions

 

ThinkstockPhotos-497797179.jpgIt’s late at night and you’re driving home from a long day of work. There is light rain falling and you have some easy listening music on to help ease your tension.  You hear a ding on your phone and see it’s a text from the family. You know you shouldn’t look at it, but it could be something important so you reach down for the phone and divert your eyes for just a couple of seconds. It’s just a picture of your dog in a silly position.  In one second you have traveled approx. 88 feet at 60 MPH, it takes roughly 480 feet to stop a car at that speed assuming dry weather. In fact, the minimum time to look at your phone and refocus on the road is 5 secs.  In that time, you have traveled more than the length of a football field without seeing what is happening in front of you.  Your silly dog photo kept your eyes off the road enough to not see the red lights of stopped traffic in front of you. At this moment, you know in your heart that you will not be able to stop in time.

 

Today’s connected world and smart phone technologies provide all types of data at any time of the day, but sometimes that data should not be available.  Texting or a new term that I created called, SocialDataTexting which includes checking email, social media, Google Maps, or anything that requires running an app are distractions on the road.  The human mind does a horrible job at multi-tasking even though we think we’re great at it.  In fact, the mind takes more time slicing jobs in essence for a section of time, meaning that your mind is not doing what you think it should be doing.

 

Yeah, but the phone dinged when I was driving and I just had to check it.  Sound familiar?  My kids yell at me when I pick up my phone while driving.  But there needs to be a better way to stop this because more than 2 million crashes a year in the USA is caused by SocialDataTexting.The Mad Man has come up with a solution, borrowed from the airline industry! Imagine if phones have a CAR MODE as part of their base operating system.  CAR MODE like airplane mode would put the phone in a state that would allow service to be shut down and only leave services on that make sense for safety reasons.  In the case of car mode in a blue tooth enabled vehicle, this would mean making only basic phone service available. For cars with text to speech converters that are incorporated into the car’s infrastructure, I suppose more services could be allowed. Now before I get all the hate mail about how the user can turn airplane mode on and off, my thinking was that it would automate as such that as soon as I connected to a car Bluetooth device, my phone goes into that mode automatically.  So if you’re a passenger or don’t want to use car mode you have the option.  But your phone will log that the device was not in car mode, and I am sure the insurance industry would try and get their hands on this data if a crash should occur.

 

CAR MODE would be an easy thing to do! Get in your car, flip the phone into mode and if someone tries to contact you, maybe your phone can send a message to the person that reads “Saving lives by driving in car mode. If you want me call me “  or “ It can wait! I will get back to you when I’m not driving.” Campaigns like It Can Wait has already taken this approach.  When you look at a car’s GPS system these days, as soon as the car is moving a majority of the system is disabled from use.  This is to keep the driver focused on the road.  Most audio systems that plays DVDs allow you to watch movies, right up until you start to drive and then the screen goes blank .  So if all those systems limit services when you are driving , then isn’t it time that our smart phones do the same?


CAR MODE can save lives and should be mandate as a new safety feature going forward.

 

Before you comment take a look at the AT&T commercial on SocialDataTexting  at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVnRcIXEqaU

After that I am sure you will get on the Mad Man Bus and tell the phone manufactures “ITS TIME FOR CAR MODE!”

What do you think ?  Let me know @NcMaldo.

 

Follow the Ramblings from an Automation Mad Man every other Wednesday. Did you miss the last post? Read it here: POD your way around town.

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