News : Arms are dead giveaway for risky drivers

• 31 March 2007
• NewScientist.com news service
• Paul Marks

MONITORING a driver's gaze - as some luxury cars are now designed to do - may not be the best way to ensure they are paying attention to the road ahead. A more effective way to spot distracted drivers may be to monitor their activity by tracking head, arm and hand movements.

In the US, around 25 per cent of road accidents are caused by inattentive drivers, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. To encourage drivers to keep their eyes on the road, cars such as the Lexus 450 are now fitted with twin cameras mounted behind the steering wheel to monitor the direction of their gaze. If they look away from the road for too long an alarm sounds.

But in a paper to be published in the journal Transportation Research C (tinyurl.com/2983ug), engineers at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, say eye gaze is a poor measure because people can be distracted without taking their eyes off the road. "People don't always look down at the dashboard to adjust the aircon or the music system. And you can talk on a cellphone while still looking ahead," says researcher Harini Veeraraghavan. Gaze detectors can also be fooled by sunglasses, says his supervisor Nikos Papanikolopoulos.

Instead, the researchers have developed a system that looks at a driver's overall actions and then classifies them as safe or unsafe, sounding an alarm if necessary. An intelligent camera continually monitors the driver and tracks what they are doing with their head, arms and hands by picking out their skin tone from the background. This data is fed into software that has learned from thousands of examples which combinations of head, arm and hand movements could be risky - for example, holding a hand to the face for long periods to eat or talk on a cellphone.

In tests, the system has shown promise, although it needs refining. Clothing with skin-coloured patches can fool the software, for instance. Sebastian Enders, a researcher in driver distraction at the German in-car entertainment firm Blaupunkt, says the approach is interesting. "Their challenge will be proving that the system can reliably detect risky behaviour time after time," he says.

From issue 2597 of New Scientist magazine, 31 March 2007, page 28

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