UKESNC winner 2011
The Accident Assessor app, created by InstantVue, has won the UK leg of the European Satellite Navigation Competition 2011, hosted by GRACE (the GNSS Research and Applications Centre of Excellence) at the Univeristy of Nottingham. The new smartphone app will help to guide stressed motorists through the trauma of a car accident, while potentially saving millions of pounds in fraudulent insurance claims.
Description of Accident Assessor
The app, developed by Nottingham based company InstantVue, provides calming messages for motorists, offers advice for staying safe at the scene of an accident and guides them through a step-by-step process of collecting the information they need to provide to their insurance company.
The innovative design prompts motorists to take a series of pictures with the camera on their smartphone, such as vehicle number plates and position of the cars in the road, and add the app time stamps and geo-tags to the images, allowing insurance companies to access a whole range of extra vital information.
This could include precise location, allowing companies to alert the emergency services or despatch a hire car to their customer, information about weather conditions accessed via the Met Office, or even matching vehicle number plates to the make and model of cars involved, to check whether the vehicles have been stolen or are insured.
Detailed photographs of the damage to vehicles at the scene could allow insurers to get instant quotes for repairs and to tackle 'crash for cash' scams in which fraudsters purposely cause minor shunts then later make much larger claims from the insurance company of the innocent motorist.