Foreign Affairs

European Cars Now Must Track Drivers’ Eye Movements In Name Of Safety

milad-fakurian/Unsplash

It became mandatory Tuesday for citizens of the European Union’s 27 member states to allow their cars to track their movements using artificial intelligence.

The European Union’s General Safety Regulation mandated Advanced Driver Distraction Warning (ADDW) systems that track drivers’ body movements, such as eye and head movements, in every new vehicle sold after July 7, according to Access Newswire.

“This is a driver support system,” Martin Krantz, CEO and Founder of Swedish AI company Smart Eye, told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview. “It’s a life-saving technology. It really helps to prevent accidents. It’s probably gonna be just like with the seat belt and the airbag.”

Smart Eye is one of the leading suppliers of eye-tracking and driver monitoring AI that is compliant with ADDW systems.

“The tracking [has] quite a high accuracy … So if you sit in your car and you’re driving your car, and then you look at the speedometer, then what happens is that the tracking realizes that this is the speedometer that you’re looking at,” the CEO added. “And then you’re allowed to take your eyes away from the road for a certain time period. Let’s say, for example, two seconds … You have a time … that you can spend on different objects [in your car].”

Cell phone use while driving is “a forbidden thing to do in most jurisdictions,” Krantz explained.

“Then it can warn immediately, ‘keep your eyes on the road,’ because it’s actually illegal to do that,” he told the DCNF. “And then if you, for example, spend time on the navigation display or on the radio, that’s also allowed, but not for too long … eventually it will tell you to move back your attention [sic] to the road. You have different distraction limits depending on the speed.”

“No one’s going to call the authorities, and no one’s going to tell on you and send along [sic] to the police or anything like that … but it’s going to be different for different car makers,” Krantz added.

NASA, Boeing, Harvard University and “28 percent of the Fortune Global 500 companies” are among the company’s customers according to Smart Eye’s official website.

“July 7 is a landmark day for road safety in Europe,” Krantz said, Access Newswire reported. “For Smart Eye, this is a moment we have been working toward for years. Together with our industry peers, we have achieved something significant: driver monitoring is now a required part of vehicle safety across Europe. But what matters most is that more lives will be saved on Europe’s roads. We believe this regulation will set a precedent for other parts of the world.”

The AI company is “the global leader in Human Insight AI, technology that understands, supports and predicts human behavior in complex environments.”

“Our industry-leading eye tracking systems and iMotions biosensor software enable advanced research and training in academic and commercial sectors. Affectiva’s facial coding provides … a deeper understanding of how consumers engage with their content, products, and services,” the company describes on its website. Affectiva is a U.S.-based subsidiary and former competitor of Smart Eye which it acquired in 2021.