Do not Worry about Drowsiness during Driving; Panasonic solves it!

By, 2018-02-28

For sure you have felt sleepy before during driving your car and wished to have a fully-autonomous vehicle to drive instead of you while you are sleeping; however, it seems very risky and fatal at the same time. Generally, you are advised to not to drive when you are sleepy. Panasonic, a Japanese multinational electronics corporation, has a completely different view in which it uses AI to keep drowsy drivers awake.

Panasonic classifies drowsiness into five levels: not drowsy, slightly drowsy, drowsy, very drowsy and seriously drowsy; it puts a system in the car to monitor drivers and knows if the driver is going to be drowsy or not and deals with the situation.

The system contains cameras and sensor inside the car that continually monitor the driver and measure facial expressions, heat loss and lighting along with other data collected from the car's environment via using AI. The system can predict that the driver is going to feel drowsy before he himself feels and it also can predict the driver's movement from one level to another. Such these accurate measurements provides the system enough time to keep them awake.

Thermal sensation plays a key role in keeping the drivers awake or not in which drivers feel drowsy when they are warm and it gets worse when the atmosphere is grim. Panasonic has the ability to adjust drivers' thermal sensation through using airflow. The change of the thermal sensation and lightening helps a lot to avoid drowsiness.

Finally, Panasonic can deal with the tiredness of the driver introducing an alarm and a command to rest. The system is a silent one by which the driver does not feel the cameras and sensors measuring everything, but s/he will feel awake. It's expected that vehicle manufacturers will test the system in October.