The World’s First Attention Powered Car

For all of you drivers out there playing with your phones, talking to friends or fiddling with the next song choice instead of concentrating on the road, a West Australian company has just come out with a mechanism that will stop you driving any further.

By Eryk Bagshaw

For all of you drivers out there playing with your phones, texting friends or fiddling with the next song choice instead of concentrating on the road, a West Australian company has just come out with a mechanism that will stop you driving any further.

The Royal Automobile Club of Western Australia (RAC WA) has done something quite remarkable, today they revealed the world's first attention powered car to raise awareness about the deadly impact of inattention on our roads. The car features a neuro headset that connects brain activity to the car's engine via customised software.

"We can’t read thoughts, but we can figure out to a fair approximation what’s going on in the brain, in general terms. We can generally detect if someone is alert, if they’re hearing things, whether they’re speaking, just from activity in different parts of the brain," said Dr Geofferey Mackellar, Chief Techincal Officer at Emotiv, "we wanted to look for specific attention related to driving and we can detect that with quite good accuracy." The technology has been installed into a Hyundai i40 which will only run at full capacity when the driver is paying attention.

Check out the awesome demonstration video above.  What are your thoughts on this ground breaking car technology? Let us know below.