Automobile industries constantly use innovative technologies. In fact, every year, the car industry tries developing some unique and innovative technologies to grab their customer’s attention.
Although a lot of products related to technology are coming up with their own strategic techniques, there is a way more on the way which is going to transform the industry of cars forever.
Here, we share some of those technologies of which you may not be aware.
1) Vehicle to Vehicle or V2V communication
This innovation is quite helpful to prevent the possible accidents that might actually happen if your are not alert. Cars will communicate with each other and alert the drivers about the roadside hazard ahead. Simply put, V2V communication would warn the driver but not take control of the car. V2V communications comprise of a wireless network where automobiles send messages to each other with information about what they are doing. This V2V technology receives a signal through the other car in your direct path, then warns you about the potential accident or either brake automatically.
2) Biometric seat prototype
Well, this is something interesting. Biometric seats use health monitoring technology to detect and alert the drivers when their stress levels are too high to drive the car. This biometric seat uses data from your face, palms, combined with real information that gets collected through the car’s accelerator, clutch, brakes, throttle as well as the steering wheel to monitor your stress levels. Simply speaking, it does a medical check to track your stress levels and lets you know if this is the right time to take a break.
3) Connected cars
A connected car is a car that is equipped with internet access. This allows the cars to share internet access with other devices both inside and outside the vehicle. A sim card will be pre-installed which can offer remote diagnostics. Based on a survey, they reveal that by 2020, there will be over hundred and seventy million cars of this type in this world.
4) Driver override systems
With the advancement of automotive technology, vehicles actively make their decision if the driver fails to apply brakes at the time of the collision. The rapid increase of sensor technology helps vehicles to make firm decisions when the driver fails to take any action manually. If this application becomes a permanent part of vehicles, then it could avoid many uncertain crashes on road. This application also helps the vehicle user to feel confident that they can get the vehicle in control if any abnormal situation happens. This also gives the ability to step on the break if the system malfunctions at any point.
5) Body panels to store energy
These body panels installed in cars and are designed to absorb energy from multiple means including plugging in overnight and regenerative braking, which is then stored and regenerated when needed. This technology would contribute to the already existing electric cars which include zero emission and superior acceleration, by reducing the size of electric car batteries, eliminating the wasted energy used up in moving the extra weight in batteries.These panels are predicted to be in production soon after 2020.
Writer, dreamer and feminist. Smruti Kishore likes what she does and does what she likes. She's a passionate journalist obsessed with words and writing the world a better place.
We live in a rapidly transforming era where humanity is making exponential leaps in technology. Thirty years ago, no one would have believed you could talk to an online voice assistant to create tasks and get things done. Ten years ago, no one would have believed humanity would land robots on Mars. Technology truly has improved the quality of living of every human who owns a smartphone and has access to an internet connection. Voice assistants are slowly replacing manual tasks and making lives easier and efficient. Siri, Alexa, Google Voice Assistant are just some of the widely used artificial intelligence based tools which are employed on a daily basis. Artificial intelligence, which is hailed as the technology of the future is now slowly making its way into much more complex domains like self driving vehicles, quantum computing and also health care.
Suki, a United States of America based startup founded by Punit Soni, developed their own voice assistant which runs on artificial intelligence to simplify healthcare for doctors and other healthcare professionals. In simple terms, Suki is akin to Siri for doctors. While you could order a pizza or schedule an appointment on Siri, doctors could modify, edit and add health records of their patients. Suki is a powerful tool to help doctors with documentation of health records which often take hours of their (doctors) time.
Suki currently focuses on documentation but has the potential to expand its usage to data queries, ordering, prescribing and billing. According to a white paper published by Suki, using its technology increases the time a doctor spends with a patient by 12% by cutting note taking time by 76%. The time which is saved also brings in a financial benefit of $30,000 more in revenue a year on average for doctors.
Suki raised a $ 20 million Series B round from Flare Capital Partners, First Round Capital, and Venrock, doubling its total funding to $ 40 million since its 2017 launch. Suki is also looking to expand its reach in India and has decided to establish Bangalore as their base of operations. India holds a lot of potential for Suki considering the amount of manual work which goes into almost any sector.
It would be interesting to watch how Suki and other similar AI based startups would transform healthcare across the world.
Clubhouse is a new type of social networking platform which is an audio only platform. This means every conversation takes place through audio where users speak to let their thoughts known. Users can create and host rooms where speakers will talk about a particular topic. Originating in the Silicon Valley, Clubhouse attracted some major names onto its platform like Elon Musk, Evan Williams, Reddit co founder Alexis Ohanian, former Y Combinator President Sam Altman, AngelList co founder Naval Ravikant, Ashton Kuthcer, Oprah Winfrey, Drake, Kevin Hart and many others are some of the influential personalities who are on Clubhouse. There is however a catch as Clubhouse is currently limited to iOS.
Leher is an Indian made alternative to Clubhouse and is a similar audio sharing and listening startup. Leher also has video support unlike Clubhouse and is also available for both Android and iOS. However, Leher does not have the biggest names in the world on its platform but it does have significant micro influencers and is growing at a rapid pace. Within 180 days of its beta version launch, the company claimed to have its users spend about 44 minutes every day and 250,000 minutes per month for live video sessions.
We at Startup Stories are curious to see which among Leher or Clubhouse would our readers choose to take part in a virtual discussion. Please let us know your answer in the poll below.
WhatsApp is one of the worlds largest online texting applications which is used almost in every country. It is a light and easy to use texting application which also offers a lot of other important utilities other than texting. These include video calling, group video calling, digital payments, document and media sharing and location sharing. What began as a simple texting application is now an indispensable part of our lives because WhatsApp has made information flow faster and safer. WhatsApp kept scaling new heights time and again and this was possible only because of the constant innovation by the developer team.
In light of the COVID-19 pandemic which forced entire countries to go into lockdown and shut down businesses, WhatsApp is doing its part to help people during these times by rolling out some nifty and important features.
Group video call limit increased
WhatsApp had the facility for group video calls which could only accommodate 4 people in a single call. However, with a new update WhatsApp increased the limit of group video calls to 8 users. The update is not just limited to increase in participants but also to the audio and video quality. There has been a noticeable increase in the quality of the video and audio in group video calls.
‘Together At Home’ sticker pack
WhatsApp has launched a new sticker pack called ‘Together at Home’ in collaboration with the World Health Organisation (WHO.) The sticker pack aims to help people stay connected throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
Restrictions on frequently forwarded messages
This is probably one of the most important features to be released during the COVID-19 lockdown. In a country like India, a lot of misinformation is shared on a daily basis on WhatsApp messages and most of these messages are forwards. The amount of misinformation on WhatsApp is so high that WhatsApp is often referred to as ‘Whatsapp University.’ During the coronavirus pandemic, WhatsApp restricted ‘frequently forwarded messages’ to be sent to not more than one chat at a time.
Chatbots
WhatsApp has launched chatbots by partnering with WHO and the Indian government and launched a chatbot to provide authentic information related to the COVID-19 virus. The chatbot developed by the Indian government is known as MyGov Corona Help Desk and can be accessed by adding +91-9013-151515 to your contacts and sending a message.
We believe that these features are definitely the need of the hour and will go a long way in creating a positive impact. Let us know if you used any of these features on your mobile device!