ASHBURN, Va. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- it's estimated that driver fatigue causes 100,000 crashes each year. Truckers often work more than 50 hours a week and can legally drive for up to eleven hours non-stop. With extra-long hours on the highway, exhaustion is a big concern. Now, virtual reality is being used to help make roads safer.
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Trucking is big business, with many late, long hours on highways. At the first sign of drowsiness, truck driver Mel Robinson doesn't waste time pulling over. "If I start really feeling tired, I just pull into a safe place where I can pull off the side of the road," Robinson told Ivanhoe.
But not all tired truckers are as safe. Driver fatigue causes 40-percent of commercial truck accidents. Now, to help reduce accidents, mechanical engineers are using virtual reality to study drowsy drivers. "The purpose of the drowsy driver study that we had was to come up with unobtrusive methods of detecting drowsiness while people drive," Azim Eskanarian, Ph.D., a mechanical engineer at the National Crash and Analysis Center in
Ashburn, Va., told Ivanhoe.
Drivers deprived of sleep drive on a simulated highway. Computers record driver behavior. Researchers have found when drivers feel sleepy, their steering patterns change -- quickly steering to the left and right in a wiggling pattern. "When you're tired, perhaps your reactions are slower and as you go off the road, you tend to correct the car more, and that correction can be captured," Dr. Eskanarian explained.
Researchers are developing a system that senses hazardous steering behavior and alerts drivers to wake up. "That warning could be an audio warning, it could be visual signals, or lighting that would come in the instrument panel," Dr. Eskanarian said. Helping you stay awake and stay safe.
The new hazardous steering detection technology will be available in about two years. In tests, a drowsy driver alerting system successfully predicted driver sleepiness with more than 90-percent accuracy.
The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.
Truckers often work more than 50 hours a week and can legally drive for up to eleven hours non-stop. With extra-long hours on the highway, exhaustion is a big concern. Now, virtual reality is being used to help make roads safer.
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