Tiredness kills. But how can you make sure you’re fresh when behind the wheel of a car? Check out Advicy Drive, a wearable that’s designed to keep you alert while driving.
It reads your pulse and detects when it’s slowing, and hence you’re nodding off.
Wear it at home while relaxing and it’ll analyse your heartbeat, and determine your personal alert threshold (i.e. how low it goes when you’re falling asleep). The app records this info and stores it for future use. Then while you’re in the car, it analyses your heartbeat and works out when you’re dropping off.
You can set four friends to be alerted if you don’t shut off the alarm within 20 seconds, so they can call and check you’re ok.
Read more: Ford’s new in-car system will slow down speeding drivers
It measures your heartbeat like most fitness trackers, by shining a light through your skin and monitoring changes in the blood flow. However, there is a more accurate way of doing so, known as bioimpedance, as used by the Jawbone UP3.
It’s a good idea, and very worthy. Not sure it had to be a piece of hardware though. Most smartwatches have the same feature set, so the firm could easily have launched an app for existing devices and kept its costs down. It would’ve been far cheaper for us punters too.
The app will be available for Android and iOS. It’s raised over £11,000 of a £70,000 target, and if successful will ship in July.