Slashdot Mirror
Digital Cameras Help Alert Sleepy Drivers
An anonymous reader writes "An interesting story on how digital cameras are being mounted in cars to watch the eye movements of drivers to make sure that they are awake. The cars include two cameras, one watching the road and one watching the driver. If there is something on the road that is a danger and the driver doesn't see, the car alerts the driver. Pretty neat technology."
I remember seeing a documentary on TV a few years ago, can't remember if it was in the UK or in France.
They had taken a dozen of drivers fitting a particular set of criteria. They had to be used to driving at night, and drive a certain mileage every week.
They rigged them up with monitoring equipment, set a couple of night vision cameras in the car and sent them on their way.
They had to drive a distance that was estimated to take about 4h.
Once at the destination a team of boffins would ask them to fill in a questionaire about how they felt about the drive, whether they felt tired, etc.
The results were simply scary:
None of them had bothered to take a break.
None of them declared having felt tired enough to feel they had to take a break.
Yet their brain activity was showing numerous periods that looked like deep sleep for less than 5 seconds.
On average these periods amounted to a whooping 6 minutes over the 4h of driving.
On the videos you could just see the drivers blinking for a unusually long time.
Having a system that detects that I'm blinking in a suspicious way, gets the driver seat to vibrate, and then sound an alarm if I don't open my eyes immediately would certainly not annoy me. I'd take the hint that I need to take the next exit and try to grab 1/2h of sleep.
My sister fell asleep at the wheel once while on the motorway and told us that she had only blinked, only to open her eyes after feeling what she described as a bump.
She took the next exit because she was feeling seriously tired and slightly puzzled about the "bump". Turned out she had hit the safety rail after drifting all the way over the fast lane.