I-Corps: Effective software tool for reducing recreational boating accidents and fatalities

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of a mobile software application (mobile app) for recreational boat operators mobile phones intended to reduce recreational boating accidents and fatalities. Such accidents result from three interrelated factors: the boat operator, the vessel, and the environment. This mobile app uses crowdsourcing data (directly from recreational boat operators) to provide boat operators with enhanced situational awareness when on the water; e.g., access to high resolution National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) charts, social connectivity, integrated tide/current data, automated float plan/tracking monitored by trusted friends or relatives, rapid access to emergency services, etc.

The commercial pathway of this app is focused on providing the basic mobile app and related safety tools to the recreational boating public for free but offering more advanced (customer requested) features such as social connectivity and group tracking for an additional fee. A second commercial pathway for this application is focused on (de-identified) data gathering of recreational boater on-the-water patterns and behavior.

These data have particular significance within the marine insurance industry for actuarial reasons and also have commercial potential within the commercial boating industry as well.

This I-Corps project is based on the development of current, sustainable, comprehensive, authoritative, non-accident based recreational boater data that is critical to the geospatial analytics needed to refine and better understand the nature and causality of recreational boat accidents. The proposed mobile app is based on a formula where the space-time array of accidents relates to a space-time function of human, technological, and environmental factors.

The primary technical hurdle is to develop a mobile app in a way that will be adopted broadly by recreational boaters and will thus facilitate the effective collection of real-time, crowdsourced data. This mobile app is intended to bridge the data gap between the scarcity of data currently available and the boating accident formula and in so doing more closely address the challenge of state and federal boating regulatory agencies; i.e., to reduce recreational boating accidents and fatalities.

To accomplish this, a more optimal means of recreational boating data collection is required to better understand the underlying nature of accident causality. This mobile application is designed to enable that data collection, to enhance recreational boat operator safety (situational awareness), to reduce recreational boating accidents, and to save lives.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.