“Assessing Asynchronous Authenticated Data Sources for Use in Driver Risk Management” in Patent Application Approval Process (USPTO 20150294422)

By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Politics & Government Week -- A patent application by the inventors Carver, Christopher J. (Bainbridge Island, WA); Wolsey, Kevin (Calgary, CA), filed on April 15, 2015, was made available online on October 22, 2015, according to news reporting originating from Washington, D.C., by VerticalNews correspondents.

This patent application has not been assigned to a company or institution.

The following quote was obtained by the news editors from the background information supplied by the inventors: "Of late, a category of insurance referred to as usage-based insurance ('UBI') has been gaining popularity as a method for insurance companies to more fairly allocate risk among their customers. The principals of UBI suggest an individual will share all vehicle usage or exposure data without regard to privacy, such as location, miles driven by time of day, time of day, and speeding/braking data all collected from their vehicle using an onboard device, or a combination of an onboard device and portable transmitter (i.e., telemetry device) directly or indirectly controlled by the insurance carrier. The methods of retrieving data from these sensors for use in the underwriting and modeling of rates do not discriminate among those driving the vehicle by either percentage of time or variation in driving scores. Furthermore, little effort is made to provide contextually relevant data and information back to the user to improve driving behavior in real-time.

"The marriage of onboard vehicle performance data with off board environmental data, replete with GPS satellite-based determinations of vehicles dynamics, has been shown to have a significant impact on determination of the frequency of collisions and near-collisions. To date these contextual computations have been performed off-board and delivered to the insurance carriers as a proxy for collisions. Insurance carriers are growing increasingly concerned about creating these analytics off-board because of three trends (1) location privacy protection for the insured, (2) an inability to directly measure and index improvements safety systems on the vehicles are creating, resulting in more and more near-collisions as demonstrated by the continued decline in highway fatalities, and (3) the quantity of data demands more distributed computing. These factors have created a paradigm shift in risk management to improve both the individual driver's ability to receive, and the insurance carrier's ability to offer, loss prevention services. The growing consensus among safety managers has been that analyzing the data from historical driving behavior--or even current driving behavior--has limited value unless one has a simultaneous (i.e., synchronous) data set from other drivers sharing the road in a common driving environment. Developing a portable safe-driving score as an input to a risk-transfer method, or risk-management device, without the ability to measure the driver and vehicle response to the forward assessment of risk (such as a warning to slow down because the vehicle is about to cross a bridge with known icing conditions) has been demonstrated to not correlate with negative outcomes (i.e., actual loss experience).

"Several embodiments of scoring methods have been documented in the related patents directed to UBI. Each such method results in a determination of risk based on granular driving history data accumulated for specific road segments. These scoring methods assume a consistent or synchronous data feed from each vehicle, and do not assume asynchronous methods of data collection.

"Conventional UBI approaches risk management as a definitive profile, from the onboard device, that does not change much with environment, or psychographics. The traditional approach has been to depend on demographics. This simplistic approach provides not only a generalized assessment of the associated exposure of the vehicle, plus an unfair bias formed from historic differences by age, sex and race--without regard for dynamic changes in the environment, or behavior of the driver as a disconnected entity from the vehicle. This approach errs on the side of legacy techniques biased by a driver's demographic history rather than present behavior, or geographic region. Further, conventional methods of risk management do not provide consumers choice in privacy settings, temporary or permanent, without reverting to prohibitively expensive risk-transfer methods. Thus, UBI as presently practiced fails to take advantage of the latest advances in onboard safety systems and behaves in a manner similar to conventional risk transfer when it fails to reveal transient changes in driving style. Because it can be shown that in a majority of cases these transients are of a shorter duration than the policy period, they are often minimally, or never, reflected in traditional motor insurance premiums with, or without UBI modifiers applied."

In addition to the background information obtained for this patent application, VerticalNews journalists also obtained the inventors' summary information for this patent application: "In an embodiment, a computer-implemented method includes receiving from a telemetric apparatus carried by a first vehicle an identity of an operator of the first vehicle and kinematic data characterizing movement and first location of the first vehicle. At least one weather condition associated with the first location is received from a source of environmental data. At least one of terrain geometry of the first location, road speed limit at the first location, vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) data generated by an instrument proximate the first location and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) data generated by a mobile instrument proximate the first location is received from a source of location-specific data. The data received by the first communication device is stored in a database. Data from the database is provided to at least one entity.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

"The foregoing aspects these novel methods for dynamic risk management, along with the many attendant advantages of this technology, will become more readily appreciated, and the same better understood, by reference to the following detailed description and the accompanying drawings, wherein:

"FIG. 1 is a data flow diagram of an archetypical system demonstrating one exemplary embodiment of the FAIR score computation and verification system 100;

"FIG. 2 describes a sequential approach to capturing and scoring the data for Driver, Vehicle, Camera and Infrastructure data outlined in 105 of FIG. 1;

"FIG. 3 describes a simultaneous process for the verification of data to be shared either as identifiable, or anonymous data, or not at all (private data based on a 'user key' authentication process, initiated by the process 100 of FIG. 1 to the user for authorization to segment each data element by classification into one of three basic categories--identifiable (shared), anonymous (shared) or private (not shared);

"FIGS. 4 thru 5 are example diagrams illustrating embodiments of a detailed method for constructing, normalizing and displaying scoring indices for an individual risk identified by VIN in the results database 101 of FIG. 1, within a fleet or group of VINs, or by decile for an entire group of businesses, for distribution to internal or external risk managers 150 of FIG. 1;

"FIG. 6 provides an example heat map diagramming the concentration of road activity, with the highest travel activity occurring in the regions color coded red and the lowest in the regions color coded blue;

"FIG. 7 is a schematic view of an exemplary operating environment in which an embodiment of the invention can be implemented; and

"FIG. 8 is a functional block diagram of an exemplary operating environment in which an embodiment of the invention can be implemented."

URL and more information on this patent application, see: Carver, Christopher J.; Wolsey, Kevin. Assessing Asynchronous Authenticated Data Sources for Use in Driver Risk Management. Filed April 15, 2015 and posted October 22, 2015. Patent URL: http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.html&r=2273&p=46&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&S1=20151015.PD.&OS=PD/20151015&RS=PD/20151015

Keywords for this news article include: Patents, Legal Issues.

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