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Car driven by levels of attention unveiled
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Australian road safety researchers yesterday unveiled a pioneering “attention-powered car” which uses a headset to monitor brain activity and slow acceleration during periods of distraction.
The car, commissioned by the Royal Automobile Club of Western Australia, is about to depart on an awareness-raising road trip of Western Australia — the sprawling west coast state accounting for about one-third of the Australian continent.
Lead researcher Geoffrey Mackellar, from neuroengineering company Emotiv, said the car’s accelerator could be overridden by a headset with 14 sensors measuring brain activity which determined whether a driver was distracted.
In tests, drivers of the customized Hyundai i40 were set specific challenges such as using mobile phones, switching radio channels, drinking water or reading a map, so researchers could record their brain activity.
They were sent on a 15 kilometers per hour “boredom lap” to see what happened when their brains “zoned out” — “pretty nasty but we enjoyed it,” Mackellar said.
Emad Tahtouh, from production company FINCH, said the car used an array of neural inputs and specially-designed software to “go when you’re paying attention and slow when you’re not.”
“We’re looking at things like blink rate, blink duration, gaze rate,” he said.
Although the system could have commercial applications, the RAC said its current focus was on research and public awareness.
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