A new AI-powered sensor that could prevent car crashes caused by driver fatigue, distraction and illness has received more than €6 million in funding.
Two Irish companies behind the project have secured the financing from the Disruptive Technologies Innovation Fund.
The joint venture, between fleet-safety technology company CameraMatics, and FotoNation, a computer-vision AI solutions firm, aims to eliminate the need for cameras in driver fatigue and distraction monitoring systems.
Fatigue is a factor in as much as 20 per cent of all road traffic collisions, according to the European Road Safety Observatory, with mobile phone use a cause of as much as 30 per cent of all cases. The in-development technology is aiming to eliminate those crashes.
“What this technology does is it scans the cabin of the vehicle, analysing the driver in terms of their face and body to identify when someone is falling asleep,” says CameraMatics chief marketing officer Tom Farrell, with the product alerting or awakening the driver using sound.
The technology will also detect when someone is looking away from the road or is using a mobile phone or even having a medical issue, but without the use of cameras which, the company says, “can raise issues around privacy”.
Instead of cameras, the companies are hoping to use “neuromorphic sensing” – technology to create computer-intelligible images that are not readable by humans.
While CameraMatics operates similar fleet-safety technologies in commercial vehicles, it has identified the private car market as the focus for the new technology – in which, the company says, they have seen “immediate demand”.
“The future of this technology, whether it is us or somebody else designing it, will be in every car in the world in about 10 years time,” said Mr Farrell.
Mervyn O’Callaghan, chief executive of CameraMatics, said the development of the technology could “generate hundreds of tech jobs in Ireland and in other global markets CameraMatics operates in”.
Petronel Bigioi, chief executive of FotoNation, said the technology “could save thousands of lives around the globe” and has the “potential to entirely eliminate road traffic accidents caused by distracted driving and fatigue”.
Imelda Lambkin, Disruptive Technologies Innovation Fund manager at Enterprise Ireland, said the technology “will dramatically impact road safety”.
The project is being developed in conjunction with the Center for Computational, Cognitive and Connected Imaging (C3I) at University of Galway and the Centre for Advanced Photonics and Process Analysis (CAPPA) at Munster Technological University.
