This week is the National Sleep Foundation’s Drowsy Driving Prevention Week. According to the NSF, the goal of this annual campaign is to reduce the number of
drivers who drive while sleep deprived. In 2017 alone, drowsy driving led to 91,000 crashes, resulting in 50,000 injuries and about 800 deaths. With Daylight
Saving Time having ended last weekend, many Americans will find their drowsiness exacerbated more than normal this week and need several days to adjust.
That’s why Nauto® is excited to roll out the new Driver Drowsiness detector this week — a progressive fatigue and time-series drowsiness model — for enhanced protection of drivers and fleets when they need it most.
What it is
Nauto's new Driver Drowsiness detector is designed to identify the onset of fatigue in more cases and from more behaviors than traditional eyelid closure-based models. This enables drivers to take preventive measures before they fall asleep, helping to significantly decrease collision risk. Many drowsiness detection models rely on eyelid-closure — basically a determination of the percentage the eyes are open over a given duration — in order to trigger drowsiness events and alerts. While fairly straightforward to implement, they typically detect and alert when drivers are already in the act of falling asleep. Very useful, to be sure, but they can miss a portion of risk exposure as the driver’s awareness level progressively decreases to the point of sleep onset. That’s where Nauto’s new detector comes in.
How it works
Nauto’s new Driver Drowsiness feature is a progressive fatigue and time-series model that looks for a number of different drowsiness-related behaviors over a period of time and accumulates a running score. These behaviors include things like:
- Yawning
- Blink rate
- Blink duration
- Drooping shoulders
- Scratching face
- Shifting in the seat, etc.
Once the score crosses our threshold, a real-time, in-vehicle alert (IVA) plays to make the driver aware of their fatigue, help bring their attention back to the road, and to take a break when possible. If the device detects continuing signs of drowsiness, additional alerts will play. In cases of extreme drowsiness, where multiple alerts are triggered over a short period, a configurable notification can be sent to home office personnel to help enable the driver to take a break.
How it impacts you
In addition to the real-time, in-vehicle alerting, fleets running Nauto’s N3 hardware with this new detector enabled will see new drowsy events in the same Drowsiness event queue that you know today.
And event details appear in just the same way as before.
The main differences you’ll notice are greater coverage of drowsiness scenarios and an increase in the number of tracked events.
How can I take advantage of these new capabilities?
Contact your account executive or Nauto customer success to find out if your hardware and subscription enable you to take advantage of this new feature.
Join the world’s leading brands who trust Nauto’s predictive driver and vehicle safety solution. See what Nauto can do for your fleet. Contact us today.
