Mercedes E-class cars to monitor your attention

Mercedes will unveil Attention Assist for its E-class cars at the Detroit auto show next month, this system has been under development for more than 10 years and judges whether you're fit to drive. When the system detects you aren't paying enough attention to the road due to fatigue, alcohol or talking on the cell phone, it will alert you to prevent accidents:

Mercedes claims its system is an independent judge of fatigue, constantly monitoring a driver’s behavior to send warning chimes and flare a coffee-cup sign when it senses a serious drop-off in alertness levels.

“Studies show that after just four hours of driving, the risk of an accident doubles,” Mercedes-Benz Attention Assist expert Jorg Breuer said. “It increases eightfold after six hours, and drivers often fail to recognize drowsiness early enough.”

To identify the point when drivers slip from awareness to weariness, engineers fitted almost 600 drivers with brain-wave-monitoring skullcaps. They figured out that there were 70 parameters that would give a better measure of fatigue than proposed camera-based systems. But the key was steering inputs.

More info at AutoWeek.