The app uses sensors present in all smartphones today to create a driving score for you. A better driving score will result in a lower monthly premium.
The app uses the following sensors:
Accelerometer assesses the car's acceleration, braking, and lane changes.
Gyroscope detects if the phone is held during driving, allowing for activities like responding to emails or messages.
Proximity meter can determine if the phone is close to the driver's face.
The magnetometer can sense how the car speeds up and slows down in turns.
Screen unlock is used to determine whether the phone is being used while driving.
The GPS sensor tracks where you drive, the duration of the journey, and your driving speed.
These sensors contribute to an overall driving score and five sub-scores for smoothness, speed, focus, time of day, and rest.
Verna partnered with the British company The Floow, specialising in interpreting smartphone data into driving scores. To ensure privacy, Verna retains only limited driving data, such as overall driving scores and your sub-scores (e.g., smoothness, speed, focus, time of day, and rest). Verna does not receive or store data about individual trips (e.g., scores for each trip, causes of low or high scores, or location data showing where you drove). This data is stored in an anonymised form on customers' phones.
To maintain this separation, Verna, in collaboration with Floow, establishes an anonymous identifier each time a new customer engages with Verna. Verna ensures that Floow receives no personally identifiable information in this process. Verna's app then transmits the trips to Floow through encrypted communication, along with the anonymous identifier. The customer's phone later retrieves the processed driving data directly from Floow, using the same anonymous identifier. This approach ensures that Floow never knows the owner of the device, and Verna only retains overall scores, sub-scores, the number of trips, the total distance driven, and the total driving time for each customer in its systems.