New App Promotes Safe Driving

 Posted on August 18, 2013 in Personal Injury

Teenagers love to download apps. Adults do too. Now there's an app that can help save teenage lives. The Canary Project is a new phone app that is available for both iPhones and Android. Its purpose is to let parents know when their teenage driver is texting, talking on the phone or using social media while on the road. The project gets its name from the old process utilized by coal mines years ago of using canaries to alert miners about dangerous gas. Today, this "Canary" will send parents an immediate alert to warn them of their teen's dangerous driving. The non-profit organization behind the app is based in Columbia, South Carolina. 52apps, a Columbia-based developer of smartphone apps, is a major sponsor of the organization, along with the South Carolina chapter of the National Safety Council and BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina. The Canary app kicks on whenever the vehicle in which the phone is located in goes over twelve miles per hour. It allows parents to set speeding limits for teen drivers, and even senses if the teen is in someone else's car and that car is speeding. Canary also tells parents when a child violates a curfew or travels into areas set as "off limits" or beyond areas set as "safe." According to a recent study that was conducted by Cohen Children's Medical Center in New York, texting while driving has become a greater hazard than drinking and driving among teenagers. Many teens openly acknowledged sending and reading text messages while behind the wheel of a moving vehicle. The study put estimates at more than 3,000 annual teen deaths nationwide from texting and 300,000 injuries. The Canary Project has also released a second version of the app for businesses, called Corporate Canary. The app notifies managers when employees use their employer-provided iPhones or Android phones while driving company vehicles, track when a driver talks, texts, checks email or uses social media while the vehicle is in motion. Corporate Canary also monitors when employees speed, exactly where the employees are and provides a detailed dashboard and downloadable reports that show each time each driver uses the phone while on the road, giving managers information and evidence for policy enforcement. If you have been injured in a car accident caused by a driver who was distracted from the road because they were using their phone, contact a qualified DuPage County personal injury attorney today to find out what compensation you may be entitled to for your pain and loss.