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Active Wellness Smart Car Seat
If automotive equipment supplier Faurecia has anything to do with it, your car seat may help keep you in good driving condition.
(Active Wellness smart seat)
“We’ve built a seat called Active Wellness. And what it does is allows us to understand something about your heart rate, your respirationrate, and then analyze that to really understand your stress level,” said Matthew Benson, an advanced innovation manager at Faurecia, one of the world’s largest automotive-equipment suppliers.If you feel stressed, the Active Wellness seat uses a biometric sensing system to activate a massage function or a heating or cooling sensation. If you feel drowsy, it could let you know before you realize it yourself.
“The way your heart rate and your respiration rate change, we have some proprietary algorithms that we’re developing that looks at those changes,” Benson said.
Faurecia teamed up with NASA engineers, the Spine Research Institute at Ohio State University and researchers at Stanford University to help create the seat’s embedded sensors that can collect vital signs without touching the skin.
Philip K. Dick is way ahead of us in his 1963 novel The Game Players of Titan, as far as front seat sensors are concerned:
It had been a bad night, and when he tried to drive home he had a terrible argument with his car."Mr. Garden, you are in no condition to drive. Please use the auto-auto mech and recline in the rear seat."
Pete Garden sat at the steering tiller and said as distinctly has he could manage, "Look, I can drive... Start, darn it!"
The auto-auto said "You have not inserted the key."
"Okay," he said, feeling humiliated. Maybe the car was right...
(Read more about Dick's alcohol-sensing system)
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