AUSTIN, Texas – Trimble is taking a new approach to the monitoring of driver fatigue.

At the American Trucking Associations (ATA) Management Conference & Exhibition, the company announced a partnership with Pulsar Informatics, which will deliver a new fatigue monitoring system to the transportation industry. Pulsar has worked with the U.S. Department of Navy, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, NASA, the U.S. Department of Defense and other government agencies, to develop and deploy its fatigue monitoring technology.

The system will be rolled into Trimble’s Safety Analytics dashboard. Instead of just identifying signs of drowsiness, such as head nodding, the system also correlates fatigue to risky driving behaviors, Jim Angel, vice-president of video intelligence solutions for Trimble, said during an interview at the ATA MC&E.

“Today, everyone’s approach (to monitoring driver fatigue) has been watching the driver,” Angel said. “Pulsar has been working with the aerospace and airline industry for over 15 years. They have a very unique algorithm where they have an over 97-98% accuracy in telling how much rest a driver has gotten.”

Trimble will monitor the driver’s behavior and benchmark it across the fleet. A driver, for instance, who has three times more lane departures than his or her peers, will be flagged.

“We compare them to the fleet average and send a proactive notice to the carrier so they can act before something might or might not happen,” Angel said.

The new offering is currently in beta testing, with positive fleet reviews, Angel explained. It will be rolled out commercially to the U.S. and Canada by early 2019, with no additional hardware requirements.