Distracted Driving Detection

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Written by Cynthia Fleischer
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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) defines Distracted Driving as follows:

Any activity that diverts attention from driving, including talking or texting on your phone, eating and drinking, talking to people in your vehicle, fiddling with the stereo, entertainment or navigation system — anything that takes your attention away from the task of safe driving.

To align the detection of distracted driving events with the NHTSA definition, the Samsara Dual-Facing AI Dash Cam (model CM32) provides an inward-facing camera, computer vision, and AI to analyze the head position of a driver in real-time. Distracted Driving AI Event Detection analyzes driver behavior for changes in the driver head position to help improve safety by proactively identifying distracted driving behavior and sending optional in-cab alerts to encourage drivers to keep their eyes on the road.

Distracted Driving Detection triggers when:

  • Driving speed is above 25mph (by default).

  • The driver head is outside of the normal range, off and on, for a sustained period of time.

DistractedDrivingVid.gif

Each distracted driving event impacts the driver safety score and triggers an upload of a five second video to the Safety Inbox starting from 2.5 seconds before the alert starts and ends 2.5 seconds after the alert ends. The video upload captures the moment of distraction, not necessarily the in-cab alert. To view a 15 second inward-facing or road-facing video, click Request 15 seconds of video to initiate the video retrieval from the safety event. After you initiate the video retrieval, you can view the video from Video Retrieval.

As with other harsh event alerts, you can create a real-time alert in email or using SMS when a Distracted Driving event occurs.

When you Configure Distracted Driving Detection, you can customize the time threshold, the driver speed threshold, and in-cab audio alerts. Increasing the severity threshold may reduce the triggering of some or all these events.

Best Practices

Distracted Driving Detection can sometimes trigger false positives or inaccurate alerts. To enable accurate detection, encourage your drivers to observe the following best practices:

  • Avoid covering the driver's head by removing glasses, hats, masks, and objects hanging in the view of the camera.

  • Ensure adequate lighting in the driver cab. Extremely dark or bright conditions can hinder detection.

  • Keep hands away from the driver's face. Any obstruction of the face can confuse the detector.

Distracted Driving Triggers

The camera must be mounted and installed correctly and the driver face and torso must be clearly visible by the CM for Samsara AI to accurately detect distracted driving. See Best Practices for more guidance to ensure accurate detection. The following examples provide different scenarios where Samsara expects to detect distracted driving and also scenarios where Samsara does not expect to detect distracted driving.

Note

Detection is not guaranteed in any scenario.

Scenario

Example

Triggers Detection

Driver lowers head to look at phone
distracted-driver-1.gif
checkmark.png

Driver lowers head to adjust radio
distracted-driver-2.gif
checkmark.png

Driver’s head bounces up and down
distracted-driver-3.gif
checkmark.png

Driver looks down at food/hands/lap/phone repeatedly
distracted-driver-4.gif
checkmark.png

Driver adjusts hat/scratches head/looks left or right while lowering head
distracted-driver-5.gif
checkmark.png

Driver uses cell phone without lowering head pose
distractied-driving-1.png
not-supported.png

Driver appears drowsy, yawns, or has eyelids closed while head remains straight ahead
distracted-driving-5.png
not-supported.png

Driver is eating or drinking, but head remains straight ahead
distracted-driving-6.png
not-supported.png

Driver is looking outside the window
Screen_Shot_2022-03-29_at_10_24_29_AM.png
not-supported.png

Configure Distracted Driving Detection

When the dash cam detects a dip in head pose while the vehicle speed is greater than the configured speed threshold, Samsara can play optional in-cab audio alerts to help notify drivers to keep their eyes on the road.

To enable and configure Distracted Driving Detection:

  1. Select the Settings icon ( gear icon ) at the bottom of your Fleet menu to view dashboard settings.

  2. From Fleet > Safety > Event Detection, locate the AI Event Detection settings and enable Distracted Driving Detection.

    distracted_driving_detection_enable.jpg

  3. Configure the Distracted Driving Detection settings:

    • In-cab audio alerts: Choose ON to play in-cab audio alerts when Samsara detects distracted driving. By default, in-cab audio alerts are OFF.

    • Speed Threshold: The minimum speed that the vehicle must be driving before an event is detected and a safety event is uploaded to the Safety Inbox (0mph, 10mph, 25mph (default), or 35mph). Increase the speed threshold to reduce the volume of events and decrease the speed threshold to increase the volume of events. Given the high volume of events (especially for 0 mph and 10 mph), Samsara uploads a maximum of one event per trip per driver, two events per hour, and a maximum of 48 events per day to the Safety Inbox.

    • Severity: Corresponds to the allowable distracted time before an alert triggers. The higher the severity, the longer the amount of time a driver can be distracted before an alert triggers. The distraction period ends when the driver returns to a normal state. The in-cab alert triggers when the driver has exceeded the distracted time threshold. Severity levels are:

      • Low: 7 seconds (2 beeps)

      • Medium (default): 9 seconds (2 beeps plus voice coaching)

      • High: 11 seconds (2 beeps plus voice coaching)

  4. Save to confirm the setting.

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