Data from cars could be used to teach more sophisticated algorithms to recognize when a person is, say, safely scrolling through the car’s infotainment system during an easy drive on a sunny four-lane highway—or riskily fiddling with a playlist while navigating city streets in the snow. Alerts might sound or flash or buzz in the latter situation but not the former.
When a driver is trying to multitask, researchers who study the psychology and mechanics of driving tend to evaluate their distraction based on whether their eyes are coming back to the road often, and for long enough, to reestablish a sense for where their car and other vehicles, cyclists, and pedestrians are in space. Driver-monitoring systems may eventually be able to combine information from the car’s many sensors to, for example, determine that a driver isn’t sufficiently paying attention when their vehicle is about to be T-boned, and tighten their seat belt.
Drivers who have already gotten on the wrong side of existing driver-monitoring systems know that their warnings and wailing can be annoying, and they sometimes cry wolf. Automotive engineers choosing when the systems buzz or beep, and how, have to strike a tricky balance.
Experts say the key to building great driver-monitoring systems is to create software that doesn’t just tell a driver when they’re doing something wrong but supports their attention. “It’s about defensive driving and avoiding conflict altogether versus avoiding crashes once you’re in a conflict,” says Greg Fitch, head of safety research at Android Auto, Google’s in-vehicle app. That could mean sounding quiet but escalating tones, not a high-pitched beep, when it sees you looking off to the side—when you may be watching for pedestrians. Perhaps the system doesn’t totally disengage automatic lane-keeping when you use the wheel to hug the side of a lane but instead shares control.
Driver-monitoring systems are too new for there to be exhaustively proven rules for what work. How best to support flawed, easily distractible people while they’re driving is still being debated by regulators, automakers, and academics. The answers may vary for different people, companies, or cultures. “Especially in Asian countries, they’re a bit reluctant to deploy loud notifications, because you might be driving other people in the car,” says Zijderveld of Smart Eye. “If an alarm goes off, other people will hear that, and they will assume you’re a bad driver.”
Some safety experts argue that much of what automakers are putting out right now isn’t good enough. Last year, the US safety group Consumer Reports began to give extra safety points to vehicles with partially automated features that also have effective driver-monitoring systems.
CR’s testing found that some automakers’ systems allow vehicles to travel for up to 30 seconds—half a mile at 60 mph—without the driver’s hand touching the wheel. (Its most recent testing gave top honors to Ford’s BlueCruise, which the company says can change lanes, reposition a car within a lane, and drive hands-free on 130,000 miles of North American highway—and includes an eye-tracking camera that alerts when a driver stops paying attention to the road for just a few seconds.)