Last Updated: 10 January 2025
The Wenco team is often asked why we chose wearables over driver-facing cameras to monitor fatigue. This article gives a few of our top reasons.
Timing is Everything
We think falling asleep at the wheel is an incident, and that incidents should be prevented, not counted. Our early warning alerts and fatigue alarms always precede an unintended sleep, to empower the driver to intervene well before an incident happens. Driver-facing cameras generally look for periods of eye closure to detect microsleeps. How long? Normally 1.5 to 2.5 seconds is the criteria to trigger an alarm – plenty of time for a driver to hurt themselves or someone else. We think that's too late, and that's the first reason why we don't use cameras.
Hide & Seek
One of the practical challenges of driver facing cameras is what's known as "tracking". Put simply, tracking is task of finding facial features including the eyes, and driver facing camera solutions often report on their tracking percentage. Good numbers sit at around 75%, with a few solutions hitting 90% in a laboratory setting. Why does this matter to us? Well since fatigue impairment can happen at any time, day or night, we think a monitoring solution should, well, always be monitoring. Being blind – pun intended – for a quarter of every journey just doesn't give the coverage that we think our users and their families deserve. That's another reason we don't use cameras.
Zombie Mode
Yup, it's a thing. The proper names are lapses, non-behavioural microsleeps or eye-open microsleeps. The drooping eyes we recognise as a classic microsleep occur because our facial muscles have relaxed. Why? Because the part of our brain that keeps our eyes open has shut down – up to several seconds prior to our eyes closing. It turns out that well before the physical signs of sleep are detectable by a driver facing camera, we can already be asleep. That's right – total impairment with no external symptoms. This "zombie mode" is not rare – in fact, it is inevitable before each microsleep. And since this form of total impairment is undetectable from the outside, it's yet another reason we don't use cameras.
The Camera That Cried Wolf
Driver facing cameras have been around for a long time, so we have a good idea of how they work and what operators experience. The top of the list of complaints from most solutions is false alarms. To be fair, nothing is perfect. That said, camera technologies tend to treat "I can't see your eyes" as "your eyes are closed", which becomes a little irritating when we simply turn our head to check a blind spot or use our side mirrors. False alarms aren't just annoying, but they can impact confidence in the system to the point where drivers start to ignore them. That defeats the purpose of the system and is the last reason we don't use cameras.
Okay, that's not really our last. We also don't use cameras because of privacy concerns, the ongoing need for 'calibration' (fancy word for making sure the camera is still pointing the right way) and the fact that the technology stays with the vehicle instead of the person.
SmartCap Is The Alternative
If you'd like to look past incident-counting technology that monitors the driver most but not all of the time and alarms them when they look out the window but not when they're tired, fatigued or in zombie mode, it might be time to check out SmartCap. Our wearable solution goes where you go, anywhere, anytime, and provides early warnings and fatigue alarms well prior to a microsleep to empower the driver to get home safe, every day.
Published: 10 January 2025
Last Updated: 10 January 2025