In USA, heart disease is the #1 leading cause of death and accidental deaths are ranked 3rd, which includes automobile accidents. The automobile accidental deaths have reduced when compared to a few decades earlier but still are around 40,000+ in 2017. That is a big number and speed, distraction & alcohol are the key causes.
Self driving cars will definitely go a long way in reducing the number of deaths but we are not quite there yet. There are issues with technology to evolve along with legal & infrastructure evolution to support their operation. Until that day, we need to figure what we fixes we can develop to take care of these deaths.
It seems to me we should be able to solve the distraction & alcohol problem by leveraging ML & computer vision tech. Previous tech to disable phones during motion has not worked as people bypass them as pretending to be passengers! And there is no easy way to self regulate or disable the car based on the alcohol content in driver’s blood stream. Now, imagine a dash cam that monitors the driver and the feed is processed by a trained deep neural net, which identifies distraction & dui condition. What do you think?
Good luck to all the Pieneers! As always, know of anyone or any startup working on this, please let me know, I will update this post.
[Image Credit: Thanks to NettoFiguieredo via Pixabay]
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