Neuro Cars to Be Driven by Thought, Mood and Emotion

Kevin Samson
Activist Post

The heavy global investment in military neuroscience is beginning to trickle down into the consumer market with an array of inexpensive devices that promise the ability to track brainwaves for a variety of applications.

Naturally, the narrative being put forth to convince people to have their minds invaded focuses on safety and convenience.

Enter the Neuro Car; it’s not just a video game.

Nissan recently unveiled its Nismo smart watch that can monitor a driver’s biometric information.

The watch and car will be in constant communication, your car can update you via your watch whenever it needs an oil change or its tires rotated. Bad at remembering your service times? It will remind you.

What’s more it’s not just monitoring the car – it’s monitoring your vital signs, your heart rate, brainwave activity and skin temperature, allowing you to see how much adrenaline you worked up doing your best track, as well as improving safety. In the future it will be able to monitor your brain condition to warn in case of brain damage and alert paramedics if needed. Falling skin temperature, diminished brain activity and a slower heart rate will also alert the car that you’re getting drowsy and the car, in turn, will wake you up and inform you that it’s time to get off the road. (Source)

Let’s take a look at some other inventions planned to merge minds and vehicles….

Back in July, a company called Walnut revealed an application for Google Glass that offered a built-in EEG to offer a “window into the mind” – in real time – then connect various mental states to Google Glass functions. The video below shows a scenario featuring a driver who can observe his “focus and attention.”

Certainly this technology could be a good thing, but with the recent revelations of the ease of hacking Google Glass, as well as unknown backdoors that may or may not be built in, it’s not hard to imagine how this could one day be used to remotely monitor people’s habits and behavior. Think insurance companies, at the most benign.

Some people have commented that the solution to the surveillance and hacking is simply to not buy these products. Very simple, except for the fact that when safety is involved, plus the financial impact in the insurance realm, how long before it becomes mandatory?

These next two developments embrace the full spectrum of the brain-computer interface merged with vehicle operation.

Emotiv is a company working hard to bring the field of neuroscience into the consumer realm. As their About section states on their website:

Emotiv is a neuroengineering company that has brought to market affordable, consumer friendly, high-resolution, multichannel, wireless EEG systems. Our amazing range of advanced algorithms allow these headsets to detect subconscious emotional states, facial expressions and user-trained mental commands which can control existing and custom applications and games as if by magic. This technology utterly transforms the way we interact with computers. Emotiv is revolutionizing human-computer interactions by allowing computers to react to your moods and deliberate commands in a more natural way. This capability is available to consumers with a range of new and existing applications. Using our SDK, developers and researchers can integrate Emotiv data directly into new applications, driving an exciting range of novel uses.

Emotiv’s vision is to democratize brain research by enabling access to affordable, user-friendly, high-resolution brain measurement systems; and encourage and catalyze innovation in this field. Applications for the Emotiv technology and interface span an amazing variety of industries – from gaming to interactive television, everyday computer interactions, hands-free control systems, smart adaptive environments, art, music, accessibility design, market research, psychology, medicine, robotics, toys, automotive, transport safety, education, self-improvement, defense and security. Emotiv is well established with developers and researchers in over 90 countries already working with the technology.

For the road, they envision The Attention Powered Car, which you can see in the next video:

The high-tech automobile has a built-in neurofeedback driver attention system which monitors the driver’s brain activity and feeds the info into an algorithm that determines whether you’re paying attention or not. (Source)

If inattentive drivers don’t get the attention of the fearful, what about car jacking and drunk driving? The latter being an incredibly hot button topic that already has swayed the public into permitting unconstitutional checkpoints. Not too difficult, then, to make the leap that an entire biometric security vehicle would be the solution, as described here:

An engineer in Japan has developed an always-on biometric security system for your car. If the system detects that you’re no longer “driving normally,” be it via carjacking, falling asleep, or intoxication, the engine cuts out. This system uses an EEG — a brainwave scanner — to transparently and continuously authenticate your ability to operate the vehicle.

In almost every case, security systems are based on one-time authentication methods: Once you’ve logged in once, you’re logged in until you log out. This makes a lot of sense for some activities, such as using your keycard to enter a restricted area, but in many other cases this actually introduces some significant security holes. For example, if you walk away from a logged in PC, anyone else could sit down and access your data. Likewise, anything that is continuously operated — like a car or a machine — should ideally have continuous authentication, in case you walk away, get carjacked, or collapse from a heart attack. (Source)

No explanation is given for what happens to the rest of the road traffic when your engine cuts out.

The latest example is the car that can evaluate your emotions.

Again, there is a security risk that needs to be attenuated: road rage. A tiny, embedded dashboard camera and sensor does the trick.

‘We know that in addition to fatigue, the emotional state of the driver is a risk factor, the researchers said.

‘Irritation, in particular, can make drivers more aggressive and less attentive,’ they added.

The scientists worked with PSA Peugeot Citroën to create the prototype, which had to overcome the challenge of measuring emotions in the confines of a small space without distracting the driver.

[…]

The scientists will aim to create a system that can work in real-time with a more advanced facial monitoring algorithm.

The team is also working on a fatigue detector that measures the percentage of eyelid closure, which could one day be used to develop a safety system to stop people falling asleep at the wheel.

They are also striving to detect distraction and on using lip reading and voice recognition, to give more of a clue to a driver’s mental state. (Source)

And for those who lean away from any conspiratorial angle to this … not so fast. Extreme Tech makes the following statement regarding the inconvenience of wearing an EEG device or even having your car fully equipped with real-time sensors.

In the future, though, an implant inside your skull could easily provide a constant EEG and beam the data wirelessly to your car, computer, smartphone, or any other device that needs constant authentication. It would be rather awesome if all of your machines and devices automatically unlocked when you got close to them, and locked when you walked away. Much more convenient than having to swipe your finger across the home button of your smartphone every time…

Yes, rather awesome.

For a more technical description of how driving a car with your thoughts actually operates, the next video from New Scientist explains: