Location Labs made a lot of national news about ten days ago when we publicly launched the first carrier-grade "No Texting While Driving" solution with T-Mobile USA in an effort to combat the distracted driving epidemic that has gripped the US. The service (which currently has a 4/5 star rating in the Android market) automatically detects when a user is driving and puts the car into Driving Mode, sending incoming calls directly to voicemail and holding text messages. When the user stops driving, the phone automatically exits Driving Mode.

I wanted to write this post both to boast a little about the technology behind DriveSmart Plus and also address some questions or misconceptions that have popped up in the past week and a half...

Technology

Location Labs has been creating innovative mobile family safety solutions for most of the past decade and currently operates what we believe to be the largest (and best!) family location platform on the planet, a platform that powers AT&T's FamilyMap, Sprint Family Locator, and T-Mobile's FamilyWhere. Years ago, we started working on a solution to address what we saw was an increasing societal problem: distracted driving. But years ago, the technology just wasn't there. We weren't able to deliver a solution that we were proud of, and so the project remained in our R&D group and we watched sadly as the statistics became more grim and celebrities threw their clout behind raising public awareness as a means to address the problem.

But the technology caught up: our engineering team had some incredible breakthroughs and the capabilities of phones continued to improve. Today, the simplicity of DriveSmart Plus belies the incredible technology under the covers: DriveSmart Plus uses patent-pending technology to detect driving while having minimal impact on battery life of the phone. This is a tremendous breakthrough: a "dumb" solution that left the GPS chip on all of the time would reduce battery life so badly that a phone battery would not survive through lunch. With DriveSmart Plus, many people hardly notice the battery impact at all---an astounding accomplishment our engineering team worked day and night to achieve in order to meet T-Mobile's exacting standards.

User Experience

While we're very proud of DriveSmart Plus, for all of the magic under the covers, there is still some magic that we have yet to achieve. There is no way (yet!) for DriveSmart Plus to know if the phone belongs to the driver, passenger, or someone riding the bus. The phone just detects when it is moving faster than 10 MPH or so. For that reason, the Driving Mode screen has a large one-press "override" button in the bottom left corner (as well as an emergency "911" button in the bottom right), which disables driving mode and returns the phone to normal functionality. This is almost exactly the "unlock" experience that most phones have, with one exception: with DriveSmart Plus, a parent can choose to be notified whenever a child activates the Override while in Driving Mode.

As you can see from the picture below, DriveSmart Plus also allows the user to "whitelist" up to three applications. This feature acknowledges that there may be some features that a user may want to use, safely, while driving: turn-by-turn navigation, for example, or a music player.

Of course, no software solution is a substitute for good judgment: you should never drive while distracted and must always obey the law. Our hope, though, is that this service will help reduce the temptation to respond to that text message and make the road a safer place for all of us.

Safe Driving,

Joel

Twitter: @kivieg