Drowsy Driver Detection System: How it Works

Drowsy driving is something that many drivers might have experienced, but among them only few survived to tell us their part of the story. It is that dangerous a death trap. The drowsiness can occur in the drivers without any prior notice, and one doesn’t even realize in time, when they slipped into a patch of nothingness, while the car was on the move.

This thin border between wakefulness and deep sleep can simply reach to a point of no return, and the result can be equally devastating for the people who are in other vehicles, or on their foot. To reduce and put an end to this deadly scenario for which no one can be really blamed for, the auto engineers came up with a technological solution that can detect whenever a driver is feeling sleepy and can create an alert to bring him out of that drowsiness, so that he at least gets the scope to pull aside the car and save himself. They call it the Drowsy Driver Detection System.

When we were looking for a car that is equipped with this particular feature, the sales team of the  Scottsdale Mazda dealers helped us find one, while explaining how it works, and the explanation was interesting enough to be shared with you all.

Drowsy Driver Detection System

To know what exactly the Drowsy Driver Detection System is, we need to know the situations that are counted among drowsy driving. The phenomenon is also known as microsleep, that speaks about those brief moments where the driver slips into a small time frame of unconsciousness, that can range between as quick as a millisecond up to 15 seconds. But the most troubling fact about microsleep is that even the eyes of the driver may stay open and yet, the driver has already lost the touch of consciousness that is enough to miss out on the road bents or traffic signal, or even sensing that a vehicle is driving in front of his.

To reduce these deadly risky events, automakers are working day and night to develop a drowsiness detection systems that can monitor the movement of the vehicle like the steering wheel angle or the tendency towards sudden lane departure and sensors to determine the level of fatigue that the driver is experiencing.

Advanced Detection Systems

The staff of the Mazda dealer near Scottsdale informed us that some advanced  Drowsy Driver Detection System are now being based on sensing technologies that can monitor the heart rate of the driver without even touching the skin of the driver. It will measure all the relevant physical signals that can detect an early warning signals for drowsiness or even a potential health issue like a heart attack. At the current scenario, the Drowsy Driver Detection System is using pads with sensors to be placed in the driver’s seat to map all the physical condition, right from body temperature to heartbeat.

An even more advanced version now is using a camera to track the head and eye movement of the driver, along with the body temperature, heart rate and driving posture and are going to be programmed very soon to perform a few emergency drive inputs like applying the brake, or pull the car safely to the side of the road, if the system sees that the driver has begun to nod off.