App eliminates distractions while driving

Distracted driving killed about 3,330 people in 2011, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Each day in the United States alone, eight people die and 1,161 sustain injuries due to a wreck involving a distracted driver, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

But Henry County Coroner Jimmy Pollard hopes that while technology has contributed to the distractions, an app can also make the roads safer. Especially if it can be loaded onto the phones of young people who have less experience behind the wheel.

The statistics are staggering: besides the 3,331 killed in distracted driving crashes in 2011, another 387,000 were injured.

For drivers 15 to 19 years old involved in fatal crashes, 21 percent of those drivers had been using their cell phones at the time of the accident.

And these crashes hurt innocent bystanders, too. The National Highway Traffic Administration reports 495 non-occupants were killed in distraction-affected wrecks.

Drivers typically face three kinds of distraction - manual, visual and cognitive, according to the End Distracted Driving website. Manual may be when a motorists removes his hand from the wheel to pick up his coffee or another drink. Visual involves looking away from the road, like when a person spills his coffee. Cognitive is when a driver daydreams about doing anything else but operating a vehicle.

"This is why texting has such a bad reputation: it always involves all three types of distraction, all at once," enddd.org said. "Researcher David Strayer of the University of Utah found that talking on a cell phone quadruples your risk of an accident, about the same as if you were driving drunk. That risk doubles again, to eight times normal, if you are texting."

A Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration study looked at commercial vehicle crashes and reached a conclusion that "text messaging creates a crash risk 23 times greater than driving without distraction."

Writing or reading a text takes a driver's mind off his most important task for about five seconds, enddd.org said. A car will cover about 300 feet during that time at interstate speeds.

While it seems obviously risky, many folks just can't ignore the siren song of their iPhone or Android notifications and keep watching what they're doing.

While the issue of distracted driving has been eclipsed by other societal problems, its toll is still too high. That's why Pollard and other Kentucky coroners have endorsed the use of the Lifesaver app, available at www.lifesaver-app.com.

Once downloaded on someone's phone, Lifesaver uses GPS to lock most of its features while the motorists proceed to their destination.

Simply put it's meant to break a person's habit of looking at their phone all the time.

Loved ones can monitor the app by way of notifications that will report when a driver arrives safely. Another kind of notification will tell the loved one - presumably a parent in most cases - that the driver tried to use the phone when engaged in operating a vehicle.

For those who wonder, yes, the owner of a phone with the Lifesaver can unlock it if they slide over to a passenger seat.

Not only will Lifesaver protect the user, but everyone else on the street, too.

While teens may see this app as draconian, it seems appropriate for a tech solution to emerge for this problem. Widespread adoption could actually make the world a little safer by reminding users to keep their eyes and their minds where they should be when zooming around in a two-ton vehicle.