A report from The Huffington Post details the new emotion recognition technology from several companies that aims to detect and prevent drowsy driving.
The dangers of drowsy driving have been widely documented. Most recently, a study found that car crashes become more likely in the few days after we adjust our clocks for daylight saving time and lose an hour of sleep.
But it’s difficult to prevent people from driving while sleep deprived because there is no benchmark for sleepiness like there is for drunkenness — even though the effects of sleep deprivation are equivalent to those of being legally drunk.
Several startups now want to do the same thing for drowsy driving that breathalyzers did for drunken driving, The Wall Street Journal reports. These companies have developed face-tracking technology that can detect when drivers become dangerously sleepy and have licensed their software to major carmakers.
