What’s on the Horizon for Family Safety Apps? Driver Safety
The total addressable market for handset-based family safety solutions continues to grow as more and more consumers integrate mobile apps into their daily routines. The ubiquity of smartphones and a growing emphasis on digital wellbeing and safety will drive increased demand for apps that simplify digital parenting with functionality such as screen time limits, real-time location services, and age-based content restrictions.
Expanding Demand for Family Safety Features
Demand for family safety features extends beyond parental controls and location tracking however. Parents of teens and young adults in their early twenties are also very concerned with another topic that is central to family safety – driver safety. According to the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT), vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death among 16- to 24-year-olds. PennDOT cites several key contributors to crashes involving teen drivers, including driver inexperience, driver distractions, driving too fast for conditions, and improper or careless turning.
Smartphones and Distracted Driving
We love them and they’ve become a focal point of our daily routines, but there’s no way around it: smartphones are a leading cause of distracted driving.
Let’s step back and visualize a familiar scenario we can all relate to: Everyone remembers how liberating and exhilarating being a young driver can be… You’re away from your parents with your friends in the car, smartphone in hand, blasting your favorite music. Perhaps you’re even texting another friend while driving to let them know why you’re running late. You’re young, invincible, and really good at multi-tasking. What could go wrong? Turns out a lot.
Here are sobering takeaways from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention:
- In the United States, over 3,100 people were killed and about 424,000 were injured in crashes involving a distracted driver in 2019.
- About 1 in 5 of the people who died in crashes involving a distracted driver in 2019 were not in vehicles they were walking, riding their bikes, or otherwise outside a vehicle.
- Texting or emailing while driving was as common among students whose grades were mostly As or Bs as among students with mostly Cs, Ds, or Fs.
How Smartphones can Boost Driver Safety
While smartphones are now a leading cause of distracted driving, they can also be a force of good in the battle to protect young people behind the wheel. Here’s why:
- Young people take their smartphones with them wherever they go.
- Smartphones are equipped with a multitude of sensors that collect data that can be used to flag dangerous driving behavior such as phone use, speeding, hard turns, and aggressive acceleration.
- Smartphones can also be used to detect collisions and send automatic notifications should a collision occur.
Incorporating these capabilities into existing family safety apps will enable wireless carriers to differentiate their digital lifestyle offerings in an increasingly crowded marketplace while extending the relevance of these services to families with older children. Furthermore, premium functionality such as automatic collision notifications, personalized driving scores, and in-app gamification further justify monthly subscription fees and set carrier-provided family safety apps apart from freemium options.
Bringing Driver Safety Functionality to Market
To help its carrier customers capitalize on the sizable driver safety opportunity, Smith Micro enhanced its proven SafePath® Family offering with SafePath® Drive. This add-on module enables wireless carriers to extend their family safety offerings into the lucrative realm of driver safety. Like other flavors of SafePath, SafePath Drive is a white-label solution that can be customized and branded to meet specific carrier specifications.
For more information on SafePath Drive or to request a demo, visit www.smithmicro.com/safepath/drive/.
