Australian road safety researchers on Wednesday unveiled a pioneering “attention-powered car” that uses a headset to monitor brain activity and slow acceleration during periods of distraction.
The car, commissioned by the Royal Automobile Club of Western Australia, is about to depart on an awareness-raising road trip of Western Australia – a sprawling west coast state accounting for about one-third of the Australian continent.
Lead researcher Geoffrey Mackellar, from neuroengineering company Emotiv, said the car’s accelerator could be overridden by a headset with 14 sensors measuring the type and amount of brain activity which determined whether a driver was distracted.
In the testing phase, drivers were set specific challenges such as using their mobile phone, switching channels on the radio, drinking water or reading a map so that researchers could record their brain activity while doing so.
They were also sent on a 15 kilometres per hour “boredom lap” to see what happened when their brains “zoned out” – “pretty nasty but we enjoyed it”, Mackellar said.
Emad Tahtouh, from production company Finch, said the car used an array of neural inputs and specially-designed software to “go when you’re paying attention and slow when you’re not”.
