This scientist is making roads safer with mobile telematics technology

Hari Balakrishnan of MIT has been working on inferring bad driving behaviour using sensor data from phones and other IoT devices in vehicles to help reduce thousands of road crashes each year

In India, over 150,000 people lose their lives in road accidents every year. Factors such as speeding, phone usage while driving, excessive hard braking or harsh acceleration are some of the factors which lead to road accidents.

Hari Balakrishnan, Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been working towards inferring these behaviours using sensor data from phones and other internet of things (IoT) devices in vehicles. This is based on mobile telematics technology which could help reduce the thousands of road crashes that occur annually.

Mobile telematics refers to acquiring and processing data from sensors such as position