FICO, the credit score company, is interested in watching you drive. OK maybe not actually recording video footage of you driving, but they are currently developing a smartphone app that can measure car forces and other telematic data while you drive.
So, why is a credit score company at all interested in analyzing people’s driving?
Unsurprisingly, it has been a known theory among auto-insurers that people with low credit scores tend to be bad drivers. The correlation makes sense; taking out credit and driving are both risk-taking behaviors that can get out of hand and even become reckless.
FICO is the ideal company to be testing out the converse of the above theory. For those unversed in math-speak, the converse would be whether “dangerous drivers tend to have lower credit scores.” FICO already has credit scores and an app that records important vehicle telematic data during a vehicle journey.
Check out this article for more information about the initiative.
Anyways, my team was given such data for many hours of actual driving journeys from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI). The data is available for free to anyone as long as they create an account on this website.
However, the free VTTI data which we had quick access to had no accidents or dangerous driving behavior. The “good stuff” required months of approval after taking an IRB course and quiz (which I actually did and passed on my second attempt). This approval process was too long for the scope of our project.
So here is how our team was able to begin quantifying a “driving score” without any data of dangerous driving behavior:
Here is the final paper
Check out our final presentation for some cool GIF’s of the clustered driving videos