Customer Profile
Industry: Logistics
Use case: Automotive smart sensing
About Poste Italiane
Poste Italiane, under Elis’s Open Italy program, recognized the opportunity to improve the work of postal workers in terms of safety and their ecological footprint, thanks to the technology of 221e.
Poste Italiane operates Italy’s largest logistics fleet, offering mail and parcel delivery services. As expected, driving between locations is mandatory, and having up-to-date, correct data about driver status and vehicle conditions helps the company to protect their people and assets.
With 160 years of history, approximately 12,800 post offices, 121,000 employees and 35 million customers, Poste Italiane plays a vital role in the country. Their contributions to the production chain and the national economic, social, and productive fabric are significant and quite strong.
The SIS (Security – Innovation – Sustainability) Connected Fleet project reinforces Poste Italiane’s role in open innovation by securing expertise in the IoT field. This is in keeping with its path towards digital transformation, which promotes the development of innovative solutions and serves as a source of support and the base for business evolution.
Challenges of the Project
We were selected through an extensive process which resulted in a match with 221e, thanks to our peculiar expertise in motion sensing AI and connected, low-power IoT sensors.
Specifically, they were interested in crash detection and accurate signaling of man-down situations without misdetections or false alarms so they could dispatch emergency personnel much faster.
Poste Italiane would need access to data regarding how their vehicles were operated during courier services to ensure driver and vehicle safety.
Realizing the potential of smart sensors and the insights this technology provides led to a request for monitoring road conditions to determine their impact on vehicle conditions and resource consumption.
Our Solution
221e installed the MUSE multi-sensor IMU on the uniform of postal workers as a wearable sensor and on 2, 3 and 4-wheeled vehicles as a black-box sensor. Through sensor fusion and AI algorithms, we provided a platform for real-time data monitoring of driver conditions and safety. The application combined our NeuraSafe algorithm for crash and man-down detection, with NeuraDrive embedded processing software for driving dynamics recognition, road surface classification and consumption estimation, to promote safer and more eco-sustainable driving.
Conclusion
The project ran for an experimentation period of 12 weeks. At the end of this period, the sensing AI developed made it possible to identify the logics and processes to support new technological evolutions. Such insights would lead Poste Italiane closer to achieving its goal of having an increasingly safe and sustainable fleet.
“In the case of 221e, I greatly appreciated their IoT expertise. They have developed a miniature MUSE sensor that adapts to multiple contexts and provides a series of environmental data that, when properly analyzed, can create a lot of value in different contexts.”
Guido Cendali Pignatelli – Open Innovation Manager
