This Car Senses When You’re Not Paying Attention and Slows Down
The Attention Powered Car slows down when you're not paying attention to the road. Image: RAC
Emotive's EPOC headset is used to measure a driver's attention. If a driver becomes distracted, the car will slow down. If they pay attention, it will move at full speed. Image: RAC
How many times have you been driving when all of the sudden you realize that you haven’t been watching the road at all? Probably more times than you’d care to admit. Distracted driving is a problem, and it’s likely only going to get worse (thanks, Google Glass). To put it in perspective, the CDC estimates that every day at least nine people are killed due to distracted driving, and it’s not just because of texting. Eating that burrito, chatting with people in the back seat and toying with the stereo knobs while manning a car are all culprits. When you really start to think about it, you’re probably more distracted than you aren’t distracted while driving, which is actually a pretty scary thought.
You might think you’re a master multitasker, but the scientific truth is, you’re actually not. “The brain is really a focused attention machine; it can really only handle one task at a time,” says Geoff Mackellar, CEO of Emotive, a neuroengineering company. “So when you feel like you’re multitasking, it’s actually you rapidly switching between different tasks.” The consequences aren’t so dire when it’s a matter of sending or not sending an email, but it becomes a bigger issue when you’re traveling at high speeds in a vehicle.
The brain can really only handle one task at a time.
Mackeller is part of a recently finished research project between Emotive and the Royal Automotive Club of Western Australia that looked at how often we’re distracted while driving by creating a vehicle called the Attention Powered Car. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a car that only runs full-speed-ahead when you’re paying total attention. Shift your focus and the car slows down to reflect your level of distraction.
Mackellar explains that driving is inherently an action that requires a certain level of task switching if you want to do it well. You have to be able to manage speed, ensure that you’re not about to run into another car, check your mirrors. Pretty basic stuff. But add in an additional distraction like a phone call or text message and task switching goes into overdrive. “This doesn’t leave any brain space for alarm signals. These are discounted by the executive system because the driver has deliberately chosen the text message as a high priority,” he explains. “Eventually the alarms become really pressing and strong enough to override the low priority they are receiving, by which time it is often too late and something terrible happens.”
They basically built a mental detection system using the EPOC that measured how frequently the drivers were switching attention. It kept track of their overall level of attention while measuring what happened when they drank coffee or fiddled with the radio station. The headset, which has been used for tons of projects, has 14 EGS sensors that measures the overall activity in the brain, though eight are focused on the frontal lobe, where much of our concentration happens.
Mackellar could tell when a driver was about to be distracted.
The researchers looked for changes in how the subjects processed information, which allowed them to get a picture for what normal driving looks like as well as detect attention switching between different tasks. Most interesting is the fact that Mackellar could tell when a driver was about to be distracted. The headset and machine learning were about to be distracted even before you grabbed your phone to send a text. “I was surprised that we could detect the level of intention to do something,” he says.
So would this actually work in real life? Definitely not in its current form. Considering people barely want to wear their seat belts, it’s safe to assume one is going to wear a goofy headset every time they get in the car. And of course, it’s enormously dangerous to abruptly slow down a fast moving vehicle surrounded by other fast moving vehicles, but the Attention Powered Car was never meant to be a consumer product. “It’s a long way where we are and something that’s road ready,” he says.
It’s easy to imagine how certain aspects of their research could be implemented into more subtle features like an alarm that alerts you to when you’re not paying attention or a signal on the windshield that directs divers attention to where they should be looking. But if nothing else, Mackellar hopes that this will be an educational tool. “It’s really made to provide a tool to demonstrate how frequently people become disengaged while in a car,” he says. Just imagine this being used to teach new drivers how to pay attention. Drivers Ed teachers everywhere are bracing for whiplash.