With the evolution of new technologies that have found utilities in big data analytics, several companies are planning to make better products which can act as solutions to day-to-day problems faced by mankind. Data analytics is being deployed almost everywhere to analyze data patterns and make predictions about unknown future events.
Carmen Automotive is a Singapore-based big data analytics company that believes in the motto “Drive smarter, Go further”. This company, founded by Chong Yeu Sem in the year 2014, claims to have discovered a new generation predictive technology which lets you drive safe by collecting your car’s data in real-time, analyzing it and anticipating vehicle issues so they can be averted. Unwanted car breakdowns led to developing this web-based car monitoring system.
The company raised US$730,000 (S$1 million) funding in the pre-series A round from Silicon Solution Venture and SEEDS Capital.
How To Leverage Carmen?
Carmen examines the health of a car helped by a Bluetooth dongle, the Carmen app and an online dashboard which can be accessed via a browser. First, you need to buy the dongle online or from the Singapore workshop following which, keeping in mind that your car is “Engine Off”, plug your dongle into the On-Board Diagnostics(OBD) port underneath the steering of your car. After that, you ought to install the Carmen app from the Play Store or iTunes and login to Carmen’s website and register your car by providing necessary details. All that you have to do next is, select the “Connect” icon and click on “Real-Time” to begin Carmen’s first real-time operation on your car.
How Does Carmen Work?
Carmen reads the following data from your car’s Engine Control Unit(ECU): battery life, coolant temperature, fault codes, fuel efficiency, tire pressure, mileage and pushes it to the cloud. By storing this data in the cloud and analyzing it, Carmen alerts you about potential problems beforehand. What this system does is, compares the past data of your car against their own benchmarks and notifies you whether your car is in good health or not. If the app detects a problem, it notifies the user to take action via the app and by sending an SMS and email updates.
Various beeps in Carmen portray its real-time monitoring feature which is as follows:
- Starting the engine, you will hear 3 beeps indicating normal operation.
- During the drive, if 8 beeps occur, this indicates Fault Mode trigger. Check the Fault code via the app and if required, clear it and check for recurrence.
- During the drive, if 8 beeps occur in every 5 minutes, this indicates that the vehicle temperature is high and you ought to stop driving immediately and let it cool down.
Salient Features Of Carmen
Carmen comes with a warranty of 12 months and doesn’t affect the performance of your car as it only reads data from the ECU and not write anything. Users must pay an annual subscription fee of S$39.90 from the second year onwards, to support the hosting and analysis of their data on the cloud. The app will inform you about the timely updates and prompt you to download them. The longer you use Carmen, the faster the software learns your car’s health. As more and more data is connected, the quality of analysis improves.
Future Plans
The company looks to expand in the Southeast Asia region and have a footprint in Malaysia and Thailand along with Singapore. The goal is to tap the 100 million car market and become the undisputed leader.
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