Injury Sciences Announces Service for Harvesting Vehicle Black Box Data
TAMPA, Fla.--Oct. 9, 2001--Injury Sciences LLC, announced today at the Annual Claims Exposition and Conference (ACE) in Tampa, a new service to retrieve "Black Box" data from vehicles after a collision.A vehicle "Black Box" is a device that records and stores data from an automobile collision. Black box information can be acquired from many vehicles that are originally equipped with devices that detect collision events and assess their severity for the deployment of occupant protection systems such as airbags. The new Data Harvesting Service offered by Injury Sciences collects this data utilizing an advanced retrieval technology called the Crash Data Retrieval (CDR) system developed by Vetronix.
Key information that can be harvested includes: pre-crash information for the five seconds prior to impact (e.g., vehicle speeds, engine RPM, throttle position, braking status), post-crash velocity changes and various vehicle diagnostics. This data is often stored and harvestable even when the airbag is not deployed in moderate or minor collisions. Additionally, the black box data that can be harvested varies by vehicle make, model and manufacturer.
Injury Sciences can harvest data from most GM vehicles manufactured since 1996. By year-end 2001, the Data Harvesting Service is scheduled to be capable of harvesting black box data from GM vehicles dating back to 1994, and several late model Fords. According to recent estimates, 13-15% of all private passenger vehicles (including pickup trucks, vans and SUVs) will have harvestable black box data by year-end 2001. Just with existing participating manufacturers, this percentage is expected to increase by approximately 2-3 percentage points each year.
Near term uses of black box data will largely benefit individual claim evaluations by identifying opportunistic fraud. Example applications include:
| -- | Determining accident severity for the vehicles involved in the collision (including low impact collisions); |
| -- | Identifying injury potential in low impact and moderate-severity collisions; |
| -- | Identifying accident causation and other negligence/liability issues; and |
| -- | Determining driver seatbelt usage. |
When aggregated over the longer term, black box data will benefit insurance pricing and underwriting departments as well as collision repair management.
Scott Palmer, President and CEO of Injury Sciences, states "Many of our customers are developing strategies to routinely harvest black box data for the evaluation of auto claims. As they are putting the necessary technologies in place to accomplish this objective, they have near term opportunities to use black box data on a case-by-case basis." Palmer further adds, "For those unfamiliar with black box capabilities, offering black box harvesting services on an as-needed basis will help demonstrate the utility and significant benefit of the technology without substantial financial investment."
Injury Sciences LLC, is headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, and is the leader in engineering-based expert systems for claims. The company's flagship product, WrExpert, was initially released in October 1998 and is now an Internet-based expert system. WrExpert evaluates the severity of specific automobile collisions and numerous other accident characteristics by analyzing damage repair estimate information, damage profiles of vehicles involved in a collision and, now, black box data. WrExpert is the first claims application to evaluate the potential for a variety of injuries for those automobile accidents identified as minor collisions and provide engineering-based diagnostics of negligence factors.