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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 can see the obvious saftey benefit from this, but perhaps the possible privacy conerns should be considered.
Suppose this follows a logical step and they add a link to a centralized server that monitored traffic volume to help the results be more accurate.
Suppose insurance companies were able to gain access to data this could produce, and started factoring your on-road alertness into their rate
Yano on second thought, that doesn't sound that bad at all.
--- "End Of Line" - MCP
I would imiagine it would be a false positive. Which is much better than a false negative, false postive makes you a little annoyed for a short while. False negative sends you out of controll into a ditch, your decision.
If there is something on the road that is a danger and the driver doesn't see, the car alerts the driver.
Now, if only they can devise a way to keep 85 year olds who think that it's their god given right to drive until the day they die, from slamming on the gas and destroying buildings and killing pedestrians because they thought it was the break pedal - or driving into THROUGH AN AIRPORT because they thought you return your car at the Hertz inside the airport.
..but shouldn't it be the drivers responsibility to stay awake while driving? If you're tired enough that you need a camera to watch your eye movement to make sure you aren't falling asleep, should you really be driving?
everyday is another shooter.
Social problems require social solutions, not technological band-aids. The reason we have so many sleepy drivers in the first place is a combination of bad urban planning that results in millions of people taking extra-long commutes, one person to a car, and erosion of labor rights that makes it possible for employers to overwork their employees and tire them.
As much as I would like to believe that there are people striving to make automatic automotive technology available tomorrow, I have a sneaking suspicion that some people out there who make a living off of a class 4 license will argue that this cannot and will never replace a human.
Pretty neat technology
What? This is not neat. This is a step backwards. If drivers gets accustomed that their car will alert them if they're about to hit something, it will probably encourage them to contiue that extra hour of unsafe driving.
Underholdning.info
The problem with all these safety features is that people feel too safe in their cars.
Going to fast? My wonderfull ABS system will bring me to a halt no matter what. Accelerating beyond my limits? Why, ASC will keep me on track. DSC will keep me on the road in those nasty corners. The new Citroen C5 has that nifty lane departure alert system, so why would I even keep my hands on the wheel, my car'll tell me when I'm flying off the road just in time!
Ok, ok, maybe I'm exagerating things a bit here, but you wouldn't believe the number of people that actually believe this stuff (or at least appear to be driving as if they believe it).
IMHO, the driver is and should always be responsible for his/her car, not some autopilot. People should be made aware of the risks of ignoring these systems more, than they should be made aware of situations they should've seen for themselves.
Know the limits of yourself. Know the limits of your car. If you go beyond either of those, no system out there now nor in future will keep you on the road.
The amount of technology designed to let the car driver fall asleep is terrifying to those who actually have something to loose from an accident.
I always thought that an interesting experiment would be to remove the driver's seatbelt and fix a large spike to the steering wheel. I suspect the number of accidents would go down ;-)
Dave
And building a dedicated railbed and running an AutoTrain would be even easier, far more efficent, and MUCH faster.
This is the thing that ticks me off about all of this "Intelligent Hiway" crap - we KNOW how to build trains. We KNOW how to build railbeds capable of supporting 300MPH trains. We KNOW how to build rail cars that will hold automobiles. R&D? We need no "R" - the research is done, we just need the development.
However, since we DON'T need any research, nobody wants to look at this technology - it isn't "sexy". So everybody talks about building more intelligence into the car - but of course we will need a huge quantity of money to fund research for those pesky problems like actually dealing with the one driver who's car is NOT on full automatic drive who INSISTS upon getting into that lane.
www.eFax.com are spammers
And this is an important point. They are group vehicles.
What this means is that they have to stop at every station on the route in the offchance that someone wants to get on or off. This makes it slow, the average speed is only a fraction of their peak or rated speed. Because they are group vehicles they also have to run to a schedule which means that you have to wait for a train. Both features make journey times significantly longer than an individual vehicle would take.
Also, because the rolling stock is carrying a large group, it is heavy and relatively few of them are built which means no mass manufacture. The supporting infrastructure must also be heavy to cope with the size of the vehicle. This makes it expensive.
Ok, you've got me started now. Group vehicles also simply can't go where everyone wants to go, their ridership is only the few percentage of the population who are with in easy reach of a station. If you add more stations to increase the number of people who use it the trains have to spend more time stopped and average speed suffers further making it slower. Because they don't go exactly where you want to go you have to switch modes or lines, each time you switch you incur a journey time penalty waiting on the schedule.
Scheduled vehicles have to run whether there are people to use it or not, this kills the overall efficiency, the vehicles are heavy, accelerating them and decelerating them takes a lot of energy. During rush hour the ridership is such that it's very efficient. As soon as you get outside the rush hour period and the ridership falls so does the efficiency.
So you end up paying a lot for relatively poor performance.
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