How smart hardware can boost your telematics product

Coloride is our modular, end-to end, customisable, B2B2C telematics solution. It provides many benefits to insurers and their customers by assessing driving behaviour and translating it into risk metrics. Drivers benefit from the improved customer experience of a digital product and rewards for their good driving.

Pure mobile-based approaches come with a few limitations, as it is difficult to tell whether the user is actually driving the insured car or another vehicle, or using any other means of transport. Solving the issue of trips being associated to the incorrect mode of transport has proven to be quite a challenge. Enhancing Coloride's capabilities to detect different means of transport has been one answer to this question. In addition to this, we have hardware.

Comparing different hardware options

Many kinds of hardware exist in the market. For instance:

• A black box, professionally installed in a vehicle, which might be harder to tamper with;
• OBD devices plugged in to a vehicle's OBD port, which might offer additional information directly from the car's control units, but could also interfere with the car's systems;
• Other devices with an integrated SIM card, which might offer better connectivity, leading to more reliable data transmission.

However, these advantages come at monetary costs or lead to other restrictions. After examining all options, we reached the conclusion that a tag offers the perfect balance between cost and functionality for tailored PHYD or PAYD products. The following overview gives an idea of the differences between the types of hardware available:

Coloride tag-based enhancements

‍Coloride Drive Tag‍

Our partner PI Labs developed a reliable and intuitive Bluetooth-based Drive Tag, which we have integrated into our award winning Coloride solution as Coloride Drive Tag, to successfully overcome the limitations related to trip detection. Specifically:

• The hardware acts as a trigger to signal when the end user is starting a ride with the insured car;
• The driver no longer needs to amend their trip history as only desired trips will be recorded;
• A battery lifespan of three years facilitates seamless operations;
• In addition, the Coloride Drive Tag can detect trips when there is no active Bluetooth connection to a Coloride-powered phone;
• The use of the Drive Tag reduces the overall battery consumption on the mobile device through highly efficient trip detection.

After having been recorded, the aforementioned detected trips are transmitted to the backend and are made available to the insurer. This helps us to detect if a driver is experiencing technical difficulties with operating the hardware, and can also help to detect cases in which the driver actively interrupts the connection between the Drive Tag and Coloride – a behaviour that can be considered as fraudulent from an insurance standpoint.

‍Coloride Safety Tag‍

Alternatively, together with PI Labs we offer an enhanced hardware device, which includes crash detection capabilities: the Coloride Safety Tag.

One of the biggest challenges is avoiding false alerts to reduce operational complexity in handling claims by the insurer. With help from our partner Collision Management Systems, we integrated a highly reliable service to filter out most of those false alerts accurately. This filtering algorithm has been developed on a dataset including over 1 million crash events and false alerts. A button in the centre of the device can be programmed to trigger any function on a Coloride-powered mobile phone, such as establishing a direct call to an insurer's claims hotline.

The combination of Coloride with the Coloride Drive Tag or Coloride Safety Tag is available globally right now. Contact our sales representatives for more details.