Brazil develops a cap that wakes you up if you fall asleep at the wheel! Ford

There are many distractions we face at the wheel that put our lives at risk, and we must avoid them at all costs. Using a mobile phone is undoubtedly one of them, but fatigue is another that also causes a large number of accidents on the road. Ford has thought about how to solve this problem and, from its headquarters in Brazil, has presented a cap that can help prevent the numerous accidents caused by drowsiness.

“A cap?” you may be thinking, but yes, a simple cap can be the right accessory to prevent thousands of accidents. It has been developed mainly for use by truck drivers in Ford Brazil, since they spend hundreds of hours on the road, and sleep is one of the biggest problems they face during their journeys.

Aesthetically it looks like an ordinary cap, but inside it hides a series of sensors that will help keep you from falling asleep at the wheel. To do this, the onboard computer system interprets the driver’s head movements to know when they are tired. Depending on the level of fatigue the user shows, the cap will emit a vibration, a sound or flashes of light. In this way the driver will be more aware that they need to stop for a break or immediately end the trip.

The first step in creating the cap was a study of head movements and which are the most typical when we feel especially tired. This database was transferred directly to the cap’s processing unit, which is connected to an accelerometer and a gyroscope to identify each type of situation.

The cap was not created only to save lives, but also to commemorate the sixty years that Ford Brazil has been producing trucks. At the same time, with this invention they seek to save as many lives as possible and to raise drivers’ awareness of the danger of driving while sleepy and not stopping to rest. To find out whether the project worked, Ford carried out an eight-month study in which a group of truck drivers covered more than 5,000 km wearing the cap.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wr-ctVrAcRU&feature=youtu.be

For now it is a prototype that is undergoing testing and a patent is needed to put it into production. Even so, Ford has presented this project to road safety experts, who say it could save many lives in the future.