Audi will work with the ‘Flying Health Incubator’ to making driving healthy.
The Flying Health Incubator helps startups develop their digital business. With Audi involvement, the German brand is aiming to develop “automotive health” as new business area – dedicated to enhance customer’s health and fitness while driving. With Audi Fit Driver, the brand is already testing services and functionalities in this field.
Audi Fit Driver is intended to allow drivers to arrive at their destinations in a more relaxed and healthy state than when they got in their car. Currently being deployed first in concept cars, the prototype’s sensors work together with a wearable item – such as a smartwatch – to monitor the driver’s vital signs. The car’s systems respond accordingly to invigorate, relax or protect the driver: for example, with a seat massage, appropriate air conditioning and interior lighting, adaptive infotainment, or in a later development phase, with a piloted emergency stop.
“More than ever, health and fitness are becoming top priorities in our daily life. With the fully connected car, we are creating the time and space to respond to this need also while driving,” says Dietmar Voggenreiter, Board Member for Sales and Marketing at Audi. “Automotive health is an outstanding example of the many opportunities that digitalisation opens up for us.”
Audi is working with members of the healthcare industry to identify trends, technical solutions and business models in the digital health market at an early stage. The focus of the cooperation for Audi is on new approaches to monitoring fitness and health and their integration into the brand’s ongoing development projects.
Within this new partnership, Audi employees will also be working alongside entrepreneurs from the digital health market. Along with a network of scientists, IT experts, investors and mentors, the incubator offers participants a research site at Berlin’s Trauma Hospital (Unfallkrankenhaus Berlin).