DriverCheck: The Swiss guardian angel for drivers
To prevent road fatalities, CSEM has developed a continuously monitoring in-cabin camera for automotives.
Road deaths in Switzerland have surged by 34% since 2019, highlighting the urgent need for new safety measures. While Europe already mandates features such as emergency braking, speed assistance, and driver attention monitoring, one critical blind spot remains: the driver’s health.
CSEM, the Swiss technology innovation centre, is addressing this gap with DriverCheck: a miniaturised in-cabin camera that continuously monitors heartbeat, breathing, and alertness in real time. If fatigue, stress, or a sudden medical event is detected, the system can warn the driver – and the data could be used by the vehicle to trigger assistance functions such as safe slowing or parking. DriverCheck will be unveiled for the first time at InCabin Europe in Barcelona on October 8.
Since 2020, Norway has required in-depth investigations of all fatal road accidents, including mandatory autopsies. The findings are striking: sudden medical events are “far more common than expected,” according to the country’s Ministry of Transport. This confirms what DriverCheck is designed to address – the health of the driver as the last missing link in road safety.
30 seconds before disaster
Imagine driving home late at night. Suddenly, sharp pain radiates through your arm and your vision blurs. It’s not fatigue—it’s a heart attack. Before panic takes over, DriverCheck sounds an alarm and hands over to the vehicle’s advanced driver assistance systems, which then flash alerts, slow the car, switch on the hazard lights, and steer to safety.
Using a tiny camera and advanced AI, the system detects micro-blinks that signal drowsiness, subtle posture changes that reveal distraction, and spikes in heart rate that point to a medical emergency. In tests, the system measured heart rate with a margin of error under three beats per minute and detected drowsiness with over 95% accuracy.
“DriverCheck acts like a guardian angel – always watching, never intrusive,” says Nadim Maamari, Group Leader Edge AI & Vision at CSEM. “Our goal is simple: to save lives by intervening 30 seconds before tragedy strikes.”
Privacy by design
It was engineered with data protection at its core. The system records no personal information, no gender or ethnicity, and no biometric profiles. All processing happens on-board, at 40–60 frames per second, with no cloud connection. This ensures full compliance with both Swiss data protection law and Europe’s GDPR.
DriverCheck is offered as a customisable hardware-software kit, ready for integration by carmakers, suppliers, and fleet operators. CSEM is now launching a co-development program to adapt and industrialise the solution.
Caption: CSEM - DriverCheck uses a miniaturised in-cabin camera and AI to monitor heart rate, breathing, and alertness in real time – with all data processed locally inside the car to ensure full privacy (image: CSEM).
Source. CSEM
https://www.csem.ch/en/