Australia’s Acusensus has been awarded the Chartered Institution of Highways & Transportation (CIHT) 2024 Road Safety Award for its Heads Up distracted driving solution.
‘Heads-Up’ identifies drivers using mobile devices or not wearing a seatbelt using roadside cameras that are able to look into vehicles and analyse images using AI. Once the potential offence has been flagged, a human checks the images to see if it should be passed on for further investigation.
“Distracted driving is one of the most dangerous driving behaviours: one of the ‘fatal five’,” says Geoff Collins, UK managing director for Acusensus. “It has been identified as a problem for many years, but the dramatic growth of smart phone use globally has led to an increased desire to produce a practical, operational solution, delivering long term, wide scale driver behaviour change. In addition, not wearing of seatbelts directly leads to many more serious injuries and deaths, where collisions occur.
The award was in recognition of the UK’s first trials which have taken place allowing multiple police forces to pilot the technology. A van and three relocatable trailers allowed the innovative camera technology to be used on almost 100 different occasions, visiting 60 unique sites and operating with 12 different police regions.
“Until recently, there hasn’t been a practical solution to address these behaviours in the UK, beyond costly and manually intensive police operations,” says Collins. “This project aimed to achieve three things – to provide a clearer understanding for the magnitude of distracted driving and seatbelt wearing behaviors on UK roads, in live flowing traffic; demonstrate that AI based camera technology is mature and can be used to capture evidential quality records for education or enforcement action; and to increase awareness with the public, alerting them that monitoring systems are being used with the intention to improve road safety for all road users.
The CIHT judges agreed the trial demonstrated the scale of this significant safety risk on UK roads and proved that a technology solution exists that could make our roads safer for everyone.
“The fact the judges placed us as the winners in a category where we were up against very worthy competition, proves that they recognise the value in using technology to clamp down on these dangerous behaviours, proving that distracted driving is being taken seriously,” says Collins. “Further trials are ongoing and we are already seeing more forces enforcing using our technology, with the goal being a reduction to the casualty toll on our roads.”
Photos: AdobeStock
