Do you text and drive? According to The U.S. Department of Transportation, 800,000 vehicles were driven by someone using a cell phone in 2008, 6,000 people died in distracted driving-related vehicle crashes, and 500,000 were injured. Smartphones are a great piece of technology, but with the ease of checking emails and texting, they have added a distraction that can be deadly. While many adults admit to texting while driving, teens are doing it far more frequently. In 2007, AAA and Seventeen Magazine conducted a survey which revealed that nearly 50 percent of teen drivers admitted to texting while driving.
OTTER (One Touch Text Response) was created after the owner's 3-year-old daughter was nearly hit by a driver who was texting while driving. OTTER is a smartphone app that has a GPS system. While a car is in motion, it fields all incoming texts you receive while driving and will automatically reply: "The OTTER user is currently driving". Once you are ready to reply (it will deactivate approximately six minutes after your car stops moving), all texts that came in will be marked as new and you can safely reply.
You can enable it to remove the distraction for you and you can use the Parental Control Feature to stop your teen from texting while driving. Activated by a password only you know, your teen will not hear texts coming in and cannot text while his car is in motion.
OTTER is currently available for Google's Android platform (version 1.6 or higher). OTTER for Blackberry and Windows 7 are on the way. Additionally, If oyu have an iPhone, OTTER plans to be available shortly. The full version (with the Parental Control Feature/GPS) is currently available for a one-time download fee of $3.99, and no recurring charges.
Do you text and drive? Have you caught your teen doing it? Do you think a phone app like OTTER is the answer?
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Comments (2)
The real answer was elucidated in Steven King's book, "Cell".
This app should be mandated by the FCC with no possible way to turn it off (by parents or teens).
MB,
I liked "Cell". It had a very "Night of the Living Dead" feel to it (and George Romero was even thanked in the notes), but the ending was kind of a cop-out.
That tends to happen in newer King books, though: He just can't seem to think of an ending with closure, so he throws in a cliff hanger.