Skip to main content

Sweden working on device to test tiredness of drivers

Marcus Nyström, researcher at the Lund University Humanities Lab, in Sweden, has revealed that the lab is currently developing a product that will be able to test if a person is too tired to drive. The project uses eyetracking, where a driver is required to follow a moving ball and his eye movements and pupil reactions are evaluated to determine if he/she is too tired to drive safely.
April 18, 2012 Read time: 2 mins
RSSMarcus Nyström, researcher at the Lund University Humanities Lab, in Sweden, has revealed that the lab is currently developing a product that will be able to test if a person is too tired to drive. The project uses eyetracking, where a driver is required to follow a moving ball and his eye movements and pupil reactions are evaluated to determine if he/she is too tired to drive safely.

The project has already tested 24 people in cooperation with the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute (VTI) in Linköping. Initial reports seem to confirm that the theory can work in practice. According to Christer Ahlström of VTI, a product of this nature would be in high demand by police forces, who are interested in finding an efficient way to measure how tired a driver is.

Under Swedish law, drivers are forbidden to drive motor vehicles when they are too tired. To date, however, there is no tool for accurately measuring this.

Related Content

  • Driver error is no barriers to road safety
    March 21, 2014
    Michael Dreznes, Executive Vice President at the International Roads Federation (IRF), is passionate about the use of the Safe System Approach to make roads more forgiving around the world
  • Cross-border enforcement close to becoming a reality
    February 2, 2012
    TISPOL Director Ad Hellemons offers the organisation's perspective on the issue of cross-border enforcement of traffic penalties, the progress that has been made and the potential hurdles yet to be overcome
  • Technology solution needed to counter mobile phone menace
    March 29, 2017
    With the UK set to increase the penalties for using mobile phones while driving, the RAC Foundation’s Steve Gooding considers what else can be done to combat this deadly distraction. The first mobile phone call was made in 1973, by an engineer working for Motorola. Today 4.7 billion people across the globe subscribe to a mobile service.
  • Avoiding the call of the wild
    June 29, 2018
    Hitting an animal on a rural road can be fatal for all parties involved – but detecting and avoiding them requires clever technology. Andrew Williams carefully scans the horizon for details. Wildlife-vehicle collisions are an ever-present threat in rural areas around the world, and there is certainly nothing funny about suddenly finding an angry moose in your headlights on a sharp bend. A variety of detection and avoidance systems are currently in use or under development to help prevent your vehicle being