AI powered personalized recommendations for safer driving with behavioral analytics
Vehicle data collection, capability, and compliance has greatly expanded in the previous decade. The volume of available data offers new opportunities to promote safe driving through driver feedback. While feedback research has shown some positive effects, successful translation faces several barriers, including adoption and long-term behavior change. Our team began to address this challenge by developing a novel behavioral analytics algorithm to personalize feedback and optimize safety nudges to improve safety. Behavioral analytics has shown success in similar challenging domains, including weight-loss and opioid addiction. Through our work we developed a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that is able to learn each driver's preferences and taylors messages to these preferences to reduce their hard breaking behavior. We validated this approach in a real world study where we enrolled 18 participants who receive daily messages based on our algorithm,. Our results showed that this algorithmic intervention had a significant effect and was associated with a 43.6% reduction in hard preaking events, with 89% of participants showing some behavioral improvements. Moreover our analysis showed that each participant recieved a different mix of messages showing that this is a key component to our method's success. Our team has been working on this project now for several years and are interested in further expanding this algorithm and scaling our validation.
About University of Wisconsin, Madison
The University of Wisconsin–Madison is the state’s flagship public research university, a comprehensive institution with a large research enterprise and broad disciplinary breadth. Industry engages through shared instrumentation, pilot‑scale testbeds, and co-located core facilities that support prototyping and scale-up. An affiliated research and technology park hosts startups and corporate R&D, while integration with a major hospital system enables clinical translation; a statewide extension network connects campus advances to companies and communities across Wisconsin. Research is sustained by competitive federal funding from agencies such as NIH, NSF, DOE, USDA, and DoD, alongside state and industry partnerships. Dedicated commercialization support—through an affiliated foundation and campus offices—provides IP management, licensing, startup mentoring, and flexible, industry-friendly agreements.
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