Davis Law Group, P.S.

Man Creates Phone App After Close Call with Texting Driver

Erik Wood, 43-year-old man was walking home with his 3-year-old daughter from Queen Anne’s Coe Elementary School when a woman nearly hit her while she texting and driving.

The woman driving a black Volkswagen did not even see the pedestrians, nor that she was close to the little girl at all, and continued to drive.

Wood was outraged by this near-accident. The incident inspired him to create a phone-application. He and his wife, worked with software developers for seven months creating “Otter,” an app that was release on the Android.

"I think we realized that we had survived our first nearly fatal text-and-drive encounter, but with two little girls growing up, the statistics proved this wouldn't be our last brush with this," he said. "That's what inspired us to do something about it."

The application detects when the phone is moving at least 10 mph. It does not completely block the text messages, but it does send an automatic response to the sender, with the short message of “Otter says BTH (Break the Habit)."

The application also has controls that can activated by parents for their children.

There are several other companies producing phone applications regarding texting. Woods says that his application is a one-time $3.99 download fee, with no recurring monthly fees. It can be downloaded from the Android Market.

There are also versions for Windows and BlackBerry phone devices that are nearly finished.
"People live in this false reality that 'I can get away with texting and driving,'" he said. "The problem is they don't know what they're missing; they don't get the wake-up call until it's a T-bone, violent crash."