Doha
Qatar Mobility Innovations Centre (QMIC) announced the official launch of its Salamtek Advanced Personal Solution for Android operating devices, for minimising phone usage while driving.
The Salamtek Advanced Personal Solution is one of the three main solution segments being developed by QMIC, as part of the Salamtek Initiative for managing distracted driving, with the enterprise and family solutions to be available in a few weeks.
This advanced version includes incentives for users to promote adoption and increase usage. For the initial 3 months rewarding period, rewards totalling about QR 30,000 in value will be offered by Salamtek consortium members to the ten highest ranked Salamtek users. This is the initial phase of a coordinated and evolving national campaign that will combine innovative solutions, incentive mechanisms, and gamification concepts to tackle the challenge of distracted driving problem.
Salamtek is a dedicated national initiative and consortium focusing on developing, deploying, and promoting innovative solutions and applications in support of reducing distracted driving caused by the use of mobile phones while driving.
It was formed in November 2014 and consists of a number of national entities that include QMIC, the Ministry of Municipality and Urban Planning, Traffic Directorate of the Ministry of Interior, Ooredoo Qatar, Qatar Insurance Company, QU’s Road Safety Studies Centre and Vodafone Qatar.
Abdulaziz al-Khal, chief commercial officer and deputy CEO at QMIC said, “QMIC has worked persistently to deliver an advanced and a user friendly version of Salamtek Personal that can play a significant role in reducing phone usage while driving. We highly appreciate the effort of Salamtek consortium members who helped us in fine-tuning the solution, contributed rewards and incentives, and for playing a significant role in executing a national awareness campaign to promote the solution.”
The next three months will be an interesting learning experience that will assist QMIC in gathering user feedback in order to enhance the solution and fine-tune incentive models to keep increasing its usage and realising its road-safety impact. This is only the first phase of an escalating national campaign and a coordinated innovations-driven strategy for introducing necessary solutions that address different user segments and use cases.
The advanced Salamtek Personal solution for Android phones is available to the public, free of charge on Google Play. The solution will provide a safety-centric ranking of the participating users in Qatar with the highest ten ranked Salamtek users being eligible to receive awards at the end of the first 3 month period. The solution will continuously provide users with information about their ranking status.
In addition to contributing to the important goal of enhancing road safety through reducing distracted driving, the Advanced Personal solution will offer users a chance to compete for a spot in the safest drivers list through a dynamic gamification concept.
