Show HN: A machine that detects when you text and drive then shocks you [video]
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I see so many drivers not engaging with what is happening around them, just so they can send some image or read some celebrity gossip or whatever the fuck people are doing on their phones. I think even stabbing them in the arm with a pencil a few times whenever they touch their phone would be less dangerous than letting people continue like this.
I really don’t get it, in the 10+ years I’ve had my driver license I have never texted and driven. Not once. I HAVE had to brake for people on bikes, children, other cars, etc. As everyone has. I have also had drivers who were texting almost hit me while on foot because they weren’t looking up. It is just a matter of time for someone to get killed by you if you use your phone while driving: the street looks empty, you look down to text Bob “lol I know right” and boom, some child just popped out from behind of a moving car and you killed it. Wtf are people doing?
So essentially the shock is adding a confounding factor to the focal impairment. The only way the shock can reduce the overall risk is through prevention. You could do that through other less dangerous methods like charging them money instead of supplying a shock.
Great point on the danger of being shocked while driving, though.
Actually, I'm not sure if the overlay is possible, but a phone call would be pretty intrusive and on speaker phone / hands-free would be ok.
It seems that the best course of action would be locking out the user from the ability to text while driving, because whatever signal the user is getting is going to add to the time spent not looking where he should, but when the user can not text while driving, this time will always be zero.
(at least in regards to texting)
I also point out that there are other ways to incentivize the driver to not text and drive, like having the driver pay a fee when they text and drive.
I appreciate the discussion but a lot of these comments are bringing up points that are clearly addressed in the video. Please don't just read the headline and comment; watch the video and then lets all have an informed discussion :)
Rich people will just pay this fee and keep texting.
Anecdotally, I noticed that all my friends who can't stay off the phone when they are driving are all heavy social media users, so I think the social shaming method will work well: The car takes a picture of them texting and driving and posts it to all their social media accounts.
Plus, with something like this, there is a difference between the end user and the person purchasing the product. The purchaser might be a parent for their child but the end user is the child. I think there's a small percentage of end users who would actually use the product their loved one bought them.
So I guess overall it feels like it would be tough to gain traction and find product market fit.
The solution would be some feature in cars which are either mandatory, or would give you enough benefits to be worth considering even if you are an inconsiderate person who texts & drives.
And the punishment / reward could come after the ride: - you texted? Well it’s your third time this month, from now on you’ll get a ticket each time you do it. - you installed the feature, so you get a bonus check from your insurance company every month.
The tech exists already: - a new mercedes have precise realtime eye tracking that makes the hud projected on the windshield look to be exactly in the same place no matter how you move your head around. - there are devices which track your driving habits (are you speeding, driving erratically, etc..), this helps you when you have to deal with an insurance case.
Losing your licence for DUI is reasonable, as you have to take several willful steps to get into that situation.
Picking up your phone for whatever reason is instinctual.
Sure, some people are physically incapable of not checking Instagram. That’s ok. They just aren’t suited for driving.
Based on your standards nobody would be on the roads.
You've also moved the goalpost, I haven't talked about browsing instagram while driving, in that case I agree with you, those people who cannot resist doing so should not be allowed to drive.
I have considered designing something to prevent texting while driving. But a zap during a drive seems like less safe and problematic. We see a lot of people who fall asleep while driving too.
A curious problem to try and solve…
I come to the same "less safe and problematic" conclusion at the end of the video (which was no surprise). It's a real problem and something worth thinking about, at least until self driving cars take over.
texting demands a huge amount of brain power. It's anything but a casual act. If it was a Cherry-Red alpha keyboard on the wheel, we might have a counter argument but really? it is still super demanding. It does not relate in anyway to speed, or gear, or revs, or situational awareness.
Nor (I might add) does a lot of stuff on the Tesla screen. It's worrysome. (I've sat in the back of a Tesla Taxi at Schiphol, and that screen is HUGE and carries a lot of non-drive related info which "moves")
In my little race car, I have no radio, no air conditioner, no carpets, roll bars, bucket seats and harnesses. You're well aware you're operating machinery, and like driving a telihandler or some other machine, you don't let yourself get distracted. Phone goes in the pocket and you're absorbed with the machine you're operating.
Yet in my daily driver I often find myself fiddling with spotify, or running through contact lists for phone calls via the head unit, playing with hvac settings, etc.
While I don't know if consumers would accept the removal of comforts for safety sake, I feel that I'm a safer driver in my bare-bones vehicle with less overall distractions and conveniences. Ultimately like with everything, I guess it comes down to more education being required.
Now, a lot of people would be sleeping at the wheel with no radio.
No AC during winter would mean driving with heavy coats on, so I’m not sure it would be safer. During summer it means no driving at all (which could be great in itself, but it’s a harder sale than you make it look)
My point is, someone’s distraction is likely someone else’s saving feature.
> Results show a significant positive association between fatal traffic crashes and heat waves with a 3.4% (95% CI: 0.9, 5.9%) increase in fatal traffic crashes on heat wave days versus non-heat wave days.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00014...
Doesn’t look fine to me.
The same way someone shouldn't be driving if they're dead tired, but even if they're in an alert state, drinking a cup of coffee can sharpen them a bit more.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_...
The number to look at is total accidents per mile rather than just fatal ones. Unfortunately that still won't really give you an accurate picture because there are far more variables than just the driver's level of attention.
Take the example of (airline) autopilots. Or in the case of a car lane keeping and radar cruise control. The driver can reallocate the cognitive energy used for precise steering input and throttle control to situational awareness, further improving safety.
These features improve safety, even (especially!) in the hands of competent drivers.
no, attention does not magically get more focused on driving by reducing already low cognitive load. most driving is already routinized, falsely lulling us into an illusory sense of security. humans do not magically get more attentive under routine when invited to be even more comfortable. autopilot is a great example: pilots eat, sleep, drink, read, and chat more, rather than paying more attention to the environment, controls, dials and gauges. this is also why traffic calming techniques that reduce overall danger are about making the ever-present risks more apparent (adding roadside trees, narrowing lanes), rather than the opposite.
those so-called "safety" features optimize for the 99% of the time that situations are routine and fine, rather than the 1% of time that they're potentially deadly, because they reduce skill and experience useful in those 1% situations. pilots talk about the same general lack of emergency preparedness induced by autopilot dependence.
The video explains some of the technical details and you get to see the hilarious experiment I ran but I'll highlight a few other key points.
- I thought a lot about different ways to detect when I look down. Originally this was just a solution for pausing the TV when I look down to eat so I don’t miss my show (lol), so I thought about using a camera to track my eyes. I started to go down this path but quickly aborted to avoid high costs and an over engineered solution.
- I eventually used the MetaMotionC sensor from Mbientlab which has an accelerator and gyroscope, among other things (more info here: https://mbientlab.com/store/metamotionc/). Their documentation wasn’t great so it took some time to get the sensor working with the Raspberry Pi. The sensor clips onto my glasses, so it was pretty simple to tweak the sensitivity settings and change it from detecting when you eat food to when you look down to text.
- Out of curiosity, does anyone have other use cases for what this glasses sensor could be useful for?
- I thought about using the Pi to send a signal to the collar to trigger the shock. This seemed pretty daunting to reverse engineer. I know I’d need some sort of transmitter to send the signal, but how else might I go about reverse engineering it to send the correct signal to the collar? Any tools, tutorials, etc that people recommend I look into? Might be useful for a future project but for this one, I used a solenoid to press the button on the remote.
- Using a solenoid to press the TV remote/shock collar remote buttons was trivial for me since I recently built a robot that plays Guitar Hero (powered by solenoids). I had struggled and learned a lot in that project so there weren't any surprises this time around.
- The actual texting and driving experiment only took about 30 minutes to run. But making the device, setting up the driving course, filming, editing, etc, made this all take about 6-7 weeks. Similar to my Guitar Hero robot which was on here a while ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26843838), it probably cost around $1,000 for everything (traffic cones are super expensive plus smaller costs like Raspberry Pi, shock collar, and misc tech parts).
Wouldn't that be even more dangerous?
"I wanted to stop smoking, so I got an implant that, when I inhale cigarette smoke, releases carcinogens into my lungs."
Why not instead of a shock link your CC and donate 1$ to a politician you like. Just pick the one from last presidential election you like less.
Manual transmissions used to perform this function and it's hard to text and drive in such a car unless you're on a highway.
Most people are right handed, so putting it on the right hand side would naturally prevent anyone from holding a phone for too long.
Unless of course they are like this acquaintance of mine who would steer with his knees. Ironically he's the one who told me about that device.
A couple seconds where a train driver is distracted != a couple of seconds where a car driver is distracted. A button is not fast enough (you would need to press it >once per second, which is not particularly comfortable)
This is why it is "necessary" to have more "advanced" ways of detecting driver inattentiveness.
Well... it's more difficult, but not that difficult. Use the top two finger to hold the phone, bottom two on the shifter, and thumb for the screen.
Ooor it's just my old 00' Corolla, which never switched properly. I bought my first smartphone in 2014 and stopped driving manual in 2015, so any overlap which could allow for such tricks was fairly short.
- A user-enabled feature for "Driving Mode" probably won't be enabled, because drivers intend to use their phone.
- An automatic system that (magically) detects that you are in a car won't work, because what if you are a passenger, or in the backseat?
- A system which activates when connected with the car's system could work, although drivers could again choose not to connect or a passenger could be connected instead.
(Although this system wouldn't actually work for learners/under 25s many states in Australia, since you are legally not permitted to connect your phone to the car stereo)
@daenz: My first thought also was that this was a very dangerous idea.
My second thought: Would it be possible to create an app that would disable the texting function while driving? E.g. use the GPS functionality to detect when the phone is moving above a certain speed. Of course, the problem with this solution is that you wouldn't be able to text when riding as a passenger in a car or bus.
My third thought: I'm too lazy right now to check, but are there apps that let you send a text by speaking the message you want to send?
There are apps that do exactly this.
It's a cool experiment, but thinking that people should be "shocked" (physically or otherwise) as a remedy to texting while they're driving is not the right approach. It's just going to cause more accidents.
I totally agree it is not the right approach and, if you watch the end of the video, I say "Is this the texting and driving solution that humanity needs? No, of course not. It makes texting and driving way more distracting and dangerous."