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This could be the sleepiest generation in history. With most people putting in longer hours on the job than ever before, 63% of all adults get less than the recommended eight hours of sleep, according to a survey by the National Sleep Foundation. If those figures are accurate, everyone from investment bankers to long-haul truckers and soccer moms are tooling down North America's highways in a serious state of sleep deprivation.
What to do? Truckers have long have loaded up on coffee or popped little white pills to avoid dozing off at the wheel. Some long-distance haulers even resort to special alarms that wake them up if they nod off. Doze Alert Driver Sleep Alarm (sold by ComfortHouse.com for $28), for instance, blasts an 86 decibel buzz into its wearer's ear -- only a little quieter than a lawn mower -- when it detects a forward head motion attributable to nodding off. If that's not a loud enough wake-up call, there's S.A.M. -- a computerized device that monitors steering-wheel movements and emits a high-decibel alarm if the driver starts to veer off the road. S.A.M. can be purchased for $235.21 (plus shipping and handling) at sleepydriver.com.
FAST TALKER. Now comes IBM (IBM
) with a high-tech innovation that makes those gadgets seem, well, so last-millennium. In May, the company patented Artificial Passenger (AP) -- a device designed to substitute for a yakking spouse or a talkative friend in the passenger seat. IBM hopes to see its invention in most new cars as soon as three years from now. It will converse with the driver -- about family matters, the weather, or the outcome of the latest Mets game. If you don't answer quickly enough, AP might turn on the radio. If that fails, the device will start telling jokes from your favorite Web site.
If there is still no response from the driver, AP can open the car windows. Or it could ask for permission to call a nearby hotel and reserve a room. There's also a last-resort option: It might spritz the driver with cold water.
Well, only if you really want it to. The cold water was just "our joke in a patent application," says IBM mathematician Wlodek Zadrozny, who dreamed up AP with co-worker Dimitri Kanevsky. Even without the cold water, AP could still make a worthwhile contribution to road safety. According to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Admin., driver fatigue causes more than 240,000 vehicular accidents every year.
AUTOMOTIVE INTELLIGENCE. It's all part of a general trend by carmakers to make cars that are smarter and more helpful. Voice commands -- telematics in techiespeak -- are already moving beyond the novelty stage. With some radios now on the market, a driver can simply name the station in order to start picking up the signal. At the upcoming fall auto show in Detroit, IBM plans to present a car that can page its owner anywhere in the world, perhaps to report an attempted theft. Another "smart car" innovation automatically dials 911 whenever the airbags are deployed.
AP won't be long in coming. Car telematics is one of IBM's top initiatives, says Raj Desai, Big Blue's director of automotive solutions. An Aug. 13 report from marketing consultancy Frost & Sullivan predicts the North American market for automotive telematics will reach $7 billion by 2007, up from $380 million last year. Says Desai: "The most critical thing we cannot forget in the vehicle is safety."
A road to riches? Maybe not. Previous doze alarms haven't always sold well. Norm Hales, owner of sleepydriver.com, reports selling only two or three S.A.M.s a month for the past three years, and he is the only S.A.M. distributor in Canada. After 40 years in the trucking industry, Hales retired last year knowing full well that the typical trucker is always tired. Hales uses S.A.M. in his old Ford pickup, the one with the camper, and his four grown children all drive cars equipped with the device. And the device often goes off in Hales' wife's Toyota. She is a nurse who faces a 30-mile drive home at the end of her 12-hour shifts.
NO SUBSTITUTE FOR SLEEP. Still, drowsiness-alert devices may meet a lot of consumer resistance. "Nobody wants to admit that they are tired," Hales says. "There's also the inherent mistrust people have about technology."
Even some experts are dubious about their benefits. Says Bob Jasmon, executive vice-president of Mid-West Truckers Assn., which represents more than 2,700 trucking companies in 10 states: "If you need this kind of device, you need to get off the road." But as long as people keep hitting the highway on too little sleep, some drivers will need help staying awake. Anyone for a few jokes?
By Olga Kharif in New York Edited by Thane Peterson
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Copyright 2001 , by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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