It has long been ingrained in most of us, that when we hear of the tragedy of a plane crash, one of the automatic next steps will be to expect news about the search for the “black box” that records flight data.
What many of us may not realize is that this “black box” technology is now becoming standard in many of our new cars.
“About 25 percent of vehicles on the road have this technology, and any car that has an air bag may have one,” says Scott Kidd, senior vice president of research and development for Injury Sciences, a company that has .NET-based applications for harvesting and analyzing black box technology.
Automobile black boxes, called EDRs (or event data recorders) came into existence along with airbags in the 1990s. The equipment that is now called an EDR was originally a tool that car manufacturers installed to measure conditions in the vehicle in order to make a decision of whether or not to release an airbag, Kidd said. As time went on, manufacturers began allowing others to access the information, opening up a new avenue of information for insurance companies.
Several companies now make solutions to help insurance companies tap into this information. Injury Sciences’ “black box” solution is a .NET-based Web application called EDR InSight. Insurance companies can use the system to look up which vehicles’ EDRs contain what types of data. They can also use the system to assign someone to read the data in an EDR and upload it into the Web-based system.
“So for example, if an insurance agent in Washington DC wants information from an accident in Phoenix, the agent can use the system to find and assign someone in Phoenix to go and read the data and upload it into the Web-based system so that the person in DC can analyze it,” Kidd said.
Users can look up information about vehicles and search for people to retrieve data from EDRs free of charge. Once they find someone, they are charged a fee if they use the system to assign someone to retrieve data, and are charged a fee for using the system to analyze data.
ProcessClaims, another partner in Microsoft’s Insurance Value Chain is also enabling clients to tap into the black box technology. The company has recently added a database of which cars have black box technology to the ProcessClaims Claim Management system. Clients using the system can be alerted when a claim they are working on involves a car that has black box technology. Through an integration partnership with Injury Sciences, clients can then with the click of a button connect to Injury Sciences through the Web to take advantage of EDR InSight or Injury Sciences’ WrExpert product.
WrExpert (pronounced wreck-spert), also .NET-based, can work with CDR Insight, ProcessClaims or as a standalone system to further analyze data to understand whether a particular accident could have caused certain types of injuries.
“It combines data on vehicle damage severity along with medical information as a biomechanics tool to examine whether an impact could have caused an injury,” Kidd said. It can also work as a standalone product, comparing other available information gathered about an accident in relation to medical data.
“The black box data helps tie down the severity of the accident,” Kidd said.
WrExpert was developed using a beta version of .NET. “When we were developing WrExpert we had to make a decision about whether to use the up and coming .NET or other Java-based products. When we saw the beta we were very satisfied with what we saw. Our developers were able to transfer our desktop product to .NET in four months – and this was on the beta, when there wasn’t yet much training available and we weren’t yet a Microsoft partner,” Kidd said. “They found it very easy to use and develop with.”
www.injurysciences.com
www.processclaims.com