I.D. Systems awarded patent for vehicle impact management system

I.D. Systems, a leading provider of wireless M2M asset management solutions, has been awarded United States patent number 8,762,009 for an automatic method of sensing, recording and reporting vehicle impacts.

The patent is applicable to all of the company’s business segments: vehicle management systems (VMS) for industrial trucks, rental fleet management systems, and transportation asset management systems for trailers, containers, chassis and other cargo assets.

“We believe this patent will help I.D. Systems extend its market leadership,” said Kenneth Ehrman, I.D. Systems’ chairman and CEO. “In the VMS market, reducing the risks and costs of industrial truck accidents is often a key factor in our customers’ return on investment, and we include impact management as a standard feature in our VMS implementations. In the rental fleet market, impact management can help rental companies identify vehicle damage—a significant cost when undetected—and charge customers back if needed. Similarly, in the transportation asset market, impact management helps identify collisions and damage that might otherwise be overlooked. Beyond our core markets, we believe our impact sensing patent is relevant in any application where end users are concerned with detecting impacts on mobile assets.”

I.D. Systems has more than 75 patents issues and pending related to its wireless M2M asset management systems.

I.D. Systems reports industrial truck safety infractions are perennially among the top 10 violations cited by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and industrial vehicle accidents are a common concern in manufacturing facilities, distribution centers and other supply chain environments. When installed on industrial trucks, most impact sensors must be manually configured, tested and adjusted over time to find a fixed threshold that generates an acceptable volume of impact events. This process is labor intensive and results in an arbitrary threshold of questionable value.

In contrast, I.D. Systems’ patented impact management system automatically sets and adjusts itself, and quickly determines what activity is within a normal range for each vehicle and what activity constitutes an actual impact event. This reduces the cost and effort of implementing impact sensing and provides a more realistic, less arbitrary definition of what constitutes a true impact event.