Digital Dashboard Device Detects Driver Drowsiness

Pickens writes "Science Daily Headlines reports that researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology have developed a self-contained, dashboard-mounted assistant system that tracks a driver's eye movements and issues a warning before the driver has an opportunity to nod off to sleep. 'What we have developed is a small modular system with its own hardware and programs on board, so that the line of vision is computed directly within the camera itself,' says Professor Husar. 'Since the Eyetracker is fitted with at least two cameras that record images stereoscopically — meaning in three dimensions — the system can easily identify the spatial position of the pupil and the line of vision.' The cameras, which can be installed in any model of car, evaluate up to 200 images per second to identify the line of vision. If the camera modules detect that the eye is closed for longer than a user-defined interval, it sounds an alarm. The Eyetracker also has applications in computer games where players could look around themselves without requiring a joystick to change their viewing direction, and in marketing and advertising, where researchers could determine which parts of a poster or advertising spot receive longer attention from their viewers."

Comments

Perfect for traffic - let's make it mandatory?

[captainpanic]

I see no problems in making this mandatory in traffic a.s.a.p.
Worst case scenario is that a silly alarm goes off when the system makes a mistake. It has very few disadvantages... the price is probably the biggest problem. Best case scenario is that it saves the lives of a number of people, saves the relatives a lot of grief, saves the health system a lot of work, the taxpayers a lot of money, etc...

I'm a little sad to see that advertisers have already seen opportunities to use this to improve marketing tricks... but I guess every invention can be abused. And in this case, I think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.