On May 8, 2008, Dave Sueper was driving to a business meeting when he was struck and killed by a distracted teenage driver who had run a red light. Scott Tibbitts, a chemical engineer and space entrepreneur who made motors for NASA, was the person Sueper was scheduled to meet that tragic morning, and he was deeply affected when he learned about the accident. Like Sueper, he was a father of two, and as an engineer he became fixated on finding a way to prevent another death from distracted driving. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, cellphones are involved in 1.6 million auto crashes each year that cause a half million injuries and take 6,000 lives. Texting while driving has replaced drinking and driving as the leading cause of teen vehicular death, responsible for 20 percent of all teen highway fatalities in the U.S. There have been several attempts to curb this disturbing trend, most often with the use of apps on phones that tap into GPS signals to detect when a cellphone is traveling more than 10 miles per hour and disable distracting features on the phone. But these apps can easily be overruled by the driver, and they dont make a distinction between a person traveling by car, public bus, bike or any other transport over 10 miles per hour. This was the mystery that Tibbitts and his team at the new company he founded, Katasi, set out to solve. Their answer is Groove, a small device that plugs into a port located under the steering wheel (found in most cars made after 1996) and connects the car to the Internet. Once each driver of the vehicle is registered with Groove, within seconds of a drive starting, Groove figures out who the driver is and notifies the persons phone carrier, allowing it to block distractions before they reach the phone. Once the car is turned off, Groove again notifies the carrier, and all blocked messages come rolling in, so nothing is missed. katasi/
Posted on: Wed, 03 Dec 2014 03:20:30 +0000