Digital Cameras Help Alert Sleepy Drivers 308
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."
Re:Better or Worse? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:French cars *are* innovative (Score:4, Informative)
Especcially Citroen seems to be at it. They used Headlights that shine into curves depending on how far you turn the steering wheel already in the 60s or 70s.
They were the first to use a very soft suspension (advertised with a car bumping over a freshly plowed field with raw eggs on the backseat. The eggs remained intact).
They built a hygropneumatic suspension that automatically stiffens the suspension. For example you drive a car speedily over a long hump, and the inertia lifts the car upwards, while the road begins to go down again. Now imagine a curve right after that. With a soft suspension the car will swing around with a lot of load-cycle changes, while the hygropneumatic suspension stiffens and keeps the car steady.
This in turn is an evolution of their suspension that adjusts the height of the car's rear so that you can easily load the trunk in a lowered car, and when startinging, it lifts the back up again compensating the load in the trunk.
Furthermore a lot of automobile companies (Opel, Volkswagen among them) used Peugeots Diesel-motor technology, since it is among the best engineered Dieselmotors.
And a few years back Peugeot made the HDI Diesel engine, that produced very high exhaust heat, so the carbon particles get burned, eliminating the black smoke from Diesel engines.
So, when do you think did the French cars stop being innovative?
P.S. I'm *not* French or something like that...
Re:Privacy concerns (Score:3, Informative)
Say you're on a two lane road (that is one lane in each direction) which allows overtaking. You're stuck behind someone going lower than the speed limit. You go to over take them (assume its a truck going up a hill) and the cars are backed up behind you.. What happens is car behind you moves into your space and you're stuck ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE ROAD. In this situation the safest thing to do is to 'feed it the fat' (jump on the gas for american readers) to lower the time spent in the danger zone..
You shouldn't get fined for this because you were driving safely..
Re:Privacy concerns (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Cool intermediate technology (Score:5, Informative)
Speeding isn't a major cause. 7% at most, in fact 80% of accidents happen within the limit. Far more important factors: Drunk, tired, distracted (eg mobile phone) and plain stupidity.
We could have fully automated vehicles today. Just not on the roads, they are too complex. There are already systems which can do the job:
http://www.skywebexpress.com/
http://www.atslt
Re:Cool intermediate technology (Score:3, Informative)
On top of that, a road train would very likely be more predictable - no speeding, no breaking the rules of the road. So bikes, cycles and pedestrians are less likely to be caught out by a car doing something stupid.
Re:Digital camera kept me awake! (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, if you're tired, and tired to the point that you're "dozing off quite a bit", then the legal (at least here in Sweden) and only right thing to do is to STOP DRIVING.
Fiddling with something other than driving (be it taking snapshots, talking on the mobile phone, tuning the radio...) is not the proper response action to tiredness while driving. Taking a break and get some fresh air, or some sleep, is.
In Swedish legislation, driving too tired is equal to driving under other negative influences such as alcohol or drugs (not that I know of any cases where the law has been enforced, unless there's been an accident where the driver was proven to actually have dozed off). "But I was taking snapshots" is no excuse. I imagine this to be the same in many other places.
Re:Alerts you to dangerous things on the road? (Score:1, Informative)