TMC said it expects the new development, along with the system’s current ability to determine the direction of the driver’s face, to play an important role in reducing collision-related damage.
The eye-monitoring feature, which is to be offered in vehicle models scheduled for launch in Japan in the near future, uses a driver-monitoring camera and image-processing computer to determine the position of the driver’s upper and lower eyelids.
If the system senses that a collision is imminent and also determines that the driver’s eyes are not properly open – or, by using the face-monitoring feature, determines that the driver is not facing forward – it issues a warning to the driver earlier than it would without such driver-condition information.