Road Geometry and Weather Factors
1 Assignment
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Accused Products
Abstract
A method is disclosed for mitigating the risks associated with driving by assigning risk values to road segments and using those risk values to select less risky travel routes. Various approaches to helping users mitigate risk are presented. A computing device is configured to generate a database of risk values. That device may receive accident information, geographic information, vehicle information, and other information from one or more data sources and calculate a risk value for the associated road segment. Subsequently, the computing device may provide the associated risk value to other devices. Furthermore, a personal navigation device may receive travel route information and use that information to retrieve risk values for the road segments in the travel route. An insurance company may use this information to determine whether to adjust a quote or premium of an insurance policy. This and other aspects relating to using geographically encoded information to promote and reward risk mitigation are disclosed.
9 Citations
23 Claims
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1. (canceled)
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2. A system comprising:
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a vehicle; a location detection unit, located in the vehicle, configured to detect locations of the vehicle comprising at least a first location and a second location; a computer processor in communication with the location detection unit; and a computer memory storing instructions that, when executed by the processor, cause the system to; calculate a safety risk score of a route of the vehicle from the first location to the second location using at least road feature information, a direction of travel, a location of one or more road features along the route, and weather information; wherein the calculating the safety risk score of the route of the vehicle comprises using direction of the vehicle through a segment of the route as a factor in calculating the safety risk score; and based on the safety risk score of the route, debit an account associated with the vehicle. - View Dependent Claims (3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13)
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14. A method comprising:
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receiving, by a location detection unit located in a vehicle, a plurality of locations of the vehicle comprising at least a first location and a second location; retrieving, by a risk unit consumption processor in communication with the location detection unit, segment values for a plurality of road segments comprising a route of the vehicle from the first location to the second location, wherein a segment value is based on two or more of road topology information associated with a corresponding road segment along the route of the vehicle, weather condition information associated with the corresponding road segment, and a direction of vehicle travel through the corresponding road segment; aggregating, by the risk unit consumption processor, the segment values for the plurality of road segments to calculate a total route risk value, wherein the total route risk value indicates safety risk of the route independent of a specific driver of the vehicle; and debiting an account associated with the vehicle based on the total route risk value. - View Dependent Claims (15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20)
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21. A non-transitory computer-readable medium storing computer-executable instructions that, when executed by a processor, cause a telematics device, to:
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calculate a safety risk score of a segment of a route of a vehicle using road topology information associated with the segment and weather information associated with the segment, wherein the road topology information comprises direction of travel at a location along the segment of the route and the weather information includes a weather condition retrieved in near real-time, wherein the calculating comprises using direction of the vehicle through the segment as a factor in calculating the safety risk score of the segment; and debit an account associated with the vehicle based on at least the safety risk score of the segment. - View Dependent Claims (22, 23)
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Specification