A new technology named Autosense has been designed to stop drivers from falling asleep at the wheel.
Intended to shake up the commercial driving industry, Autosense uses a camera to spot when a driver starts to fall asleep — if their eyes close for a second and a half, it shakes their seat.
Autosense chief executive Charles Dawson said the company was seeing an increase in cases of "micro-sleeps".
"For the 5000 Guardian units that we have installed around New Zealand in light and heavy vehicles, there has been 30% more micro-sleep events per kilometre driven" between 2021 and 2022, he said.
Autosense only monitors commercial vehicles — trucks, buses and company cars — but Dawson believes other drivers were falling asleep just as much.
"The one common thing in all vehicles is the human being, the driver, and if human beings don't have enough sleep they will at some stage fall asleep," Dawson said.
The system uses an infrared camera on the dashboard and an algorithm that monitors the driver's face.
Autosense hopes it will be installed in vehicles when they're purchased as an added safety feature.
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