Road accident prediction company Predina uses data to predict the location of high-risk driving routes and alerts drivers so they can avoid them or take extra caution. Co-founder and CTO Meha Nelson said that the premise of Predina is that the external environment is what causes an accident, not just the human driver.
“If you are in an area which has a high risk, one mistake could turn into an accident but if you are in another area, you might have a near miss or you might get away with it,” she said.
The data start-up initially worked with one supplier of natural gas and assessed that company’s accident data from their fleets trucks, in addition to UK government traffic data from the past 10 years.
In December 2016, Nelson alongside co-founder and CEO Bola Adegbulu decided to combine her experience in computer science and AI, and his experience of having founded an automotive start-up to create a technology that would benefit the social good of society. “We wanted to create an impact and touch the lives of human beings and basically solve a problem,” she said.
In 2018, in Great Britain alone, there were 160,378 reported road traffic accidents and 1,782 reported road deaths. The aftermath of accidents lead to roads being closed, traffic being diverted and increased congestion – congestion in the UK is estimated to cost the economy £7.9 billion per year.
The industrial gas company that Predina partnered with could suffer a loss of £1 million from one major accident and if one of their drivers hit a bridge or a lamppost the company will “have to pay a lot of money to the government,” according to Nelson. Fortunately the data that the gas company provided to Nelson and her team was anonymised and so they did not have to do any additional processing. The enforcement of sanctions for breaching GDPR did however mean that data was not as easy to get hold of as it had been previously.
“Before they were able to send us data via email, it was simple. After a lot more people had to get involved because basically they had to write a script in which they anonymised a lot of things, a lot of data would be removed and then it would reach us,” said Nelson.
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