Mind-powered system helps improve road safety

Australian electronics company Emotiv has developed a new system designed to reduce fatalities and improve road safety. The system communicates with the car and when the driver’s level of attention drops the car safely slows down, alerting the driver to their lapse in concentration. Emotiv’s system is featured in the Royal Automobile Club of Western Australia’s (RAC) attention powered car designed to raise awareness about the deadly impact of inattention on our roads.

The company’s EEG neuro headset connects brain activity to the car’s engine via customised software. The headset has 14 sensors detecting electrical activity from the frontal, temple, parietal and perceptual areas of the brain. The amount of activity in these areas registers what the driver is cognitively processing or if they are zoning out. It can also tell if the driver is task switching, which means they’re paying attention, just not to driving. A gyroscope, GPS and an accelerometer are also included to improve accuracy and to measure a whole range of variables including head movement.

Dr Geoffrey Mackellar, chief technical officer at research company Emotiv, said discerning when someone’s actually paying attention and when they’re not is a very difficult thing to do, especially in a driving context.

“We can’t read thoughts, but we can figure out to a fair approximation what’s going on in the brain, in general terms. We can generally detect if someone is alert, if they’re hearing things, whether they’re speaking, just from activity in different parts of the brain,” Dr Mackellar said.

“We wanted to look for specific attention related to driving, and we can detect that with quite good accuracy.” The technology has been installed into a 5-star ANCAP safety rated Hyundai i40 which will only run at full capacity when the driver is paying attention.

“The impact of inattention is now comparable to the number of deaths and serious injuries caused by speed and drink driving which are all contributors to WA consistently having the worst fatality rate of any Australian state. Nationally, it is estimated inattention was a factor in 46% of fatal crashes,” said RAC Executive General Manager Pat Walker.

“Over the past 20 years, WA has gone from best in class to worst in class. Since 2006 we have consistently been above the national fatality rate and alarmingly more than half of fatalities in WA happen on our country roads. If WA’s fatality rate came down to the national rate, more than 45 lives would be saved each year.”

The RAC will use the attention-powered car to directly engage the WA community, raise awareness about inattention and to find possible solutions to try to help save lives on our roads.