Visualizing Risk: How Data Visualization Can Help Fight Distracted Driving

Nicholas Arcolano, Ph.D.Senior Data Scientist, TrueMotion

@arcolano

● Boston-based startup founded in 2012

● Working to make driving safer and more affordable

● Partnering with auto insurers to provide discounts for safe driving

● Focusing on understanding distracted driving and encouraging behavior change

About TrueMotion

Driving is one of the most dangerous things people do daily

We use signal processing and machine learning to characterize driver behavior and accident risk

● How much you drive: annual mileage

● When and where you drive: city vs. highway,road conditions, time of day

● How you behave behind the wheel: speeding, acceleration, braking, cornering, and especially distracted driving habits

Distracted driving dramatically elevates your risk of an accident

Drivers who admit to texting while driving136%

Drivers who actually text while driving270%

Increase in baseline driving risk due to texting while driving36x

1. State Farm Distracted Driving Survey 20152. TrueMotion 2015 field test of 360 drivers / 17,000 trips3. Dingus et al (2016), Driver crash risk factors and prevalence evaluation using naturalistic driving data

If distracted driving is so dangerous,then why do we do it?

Let’s take a short detour...

Behavioral economics

● Why do people make irrational / sub-optimal decisions?

● Biases: information we use to make decisions is often not representative

● Heuristics: we often approximate hard decisions with simpler ones

Biases and heuristics

Optimistic bias / overconfidence

● We often think we have more control over events than we really do (“illusion of control”)

● Thinking we have too much control while driving can lead us to make poor decisions while behind the wheel

Availability heuristic

● We estimate true probabilities using the frequencies of our real-world experiences

● By driving without getting into an accident, we believe driving is less risky than it actually is

TrueMotion’s goal: to get people to think differently about the risks of distracted driving

Data visualization helps counteract our cognitive biases by allowing us to

explore complex causes and effects

Data visualization can help us to...

● Show drivers how individual choices aggregate into long-term behavior

● Help drivers understand how their actions affect their risk of an accident

● Illustrate how changes in risk equate to real-world consequences

TrueMotion distraction insightsand context

What about understandinglong-term accident risk?

Years You Have Left to Live, Probablyhttp://flowingdata.com/2015/09/23/years-you-have-left-to-live-probably/

How You Will Diehttp://flowingdata.com/2016/01/19/how-you-will-die/

How Other People Diehttp://flowingdata.com/2016/01/05/causes-of-death/

TrueMotion GradeMyDrive

● Visualization project with Matt Beaulieu (WPI)

● Combines predictive risk modeling with accident data to help people understand the impact of their driving behaviors

● Allows drivers to experiment with behavior to understand how choices can change outcomes

Ongoing work

● Real-time feedback of driving risk (based on behavior, traffic, road conditions)

● Modeling and visualization of risk habits: understanding when, where, and why you take your biggest risks

● Relative risk: modeling and visualizing how your choices and risk compare to drivers like you

THANK YOU!