Technology drives attention-powered car

The Royal Automobile Club of Western Australia (RAC) has revealed an ‘Attention Powered Car’ to raise awareness about the deadly impact of inattention on our roads.

The car features an Emotiv EEG neuro headset that connects brain activity to the car’s engine via customised software.

The software 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.

RAC Executive General Manager Pat Walker said inattention can be described as a driver failing to pay sufficient attention to the activities required for safe driving.

“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 that inattention was a factor in 46% of fatal crashes.

“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.”

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 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.

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 RAC is committed to saving lives on our roads and the Attention Powered Car will assist people to understand the importance of paying attention and what are the factors distracting us while we drive.

“We are also highlighting the impact of how quickly we can lose concentration, causing lives to be lost and leaving families and friends to deal with the consequences of road trauma.

“As well as learning more about how we think and react in a vehicle, we hope this initiative will help West Australian drivers to acknowledge the fact that we often don’t pay enough attention behind the wheel in the way we should,” Walker said.

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.

For more information on the Attention Powered Car, and to view a series of webisodes, visit ForTheBetter.com.au.