Is there potential for biometrics in-car health monitoring?

In the future, will your car also be your doctor?

That’s not as farfetched as it might sound. For example, in-car breathalyzers have been used for years to check the sobriety levels of drivers previously convicted of drunk-driving offenses (passing a test allows the driver to turn over the vehicle and ride it away). With the popularity of mobile devices and wearable technology, healthcare monitoring services are easily available in a driver’s pocket or on his or her wrist; it isn’t hard to connect or adapt these to a car’s software platform.

“Today, we have technology we could not imagine being a part of the average person’s daily life a generation or two ago,” said Jennifer Tisdale, CEO of cyber-security company GRIMM. “It is not a big leap to imagine a scenario where technology could achieve medical diagnosis or at least medical alerts notifying passengers to obtain a medical exam.”

The health status of the driver is, naturally, of paramount importance. So, it’s understandable that many of the scattered health monitoring functionalities of ADAS platforms are concentrated on this. Camera-based solutions monitor the body positions of car pilots; if these are found to be assuming a sleeping position, an alarm is triggered to keep that person awake. Perhaps it’s not too much of a leap from here to the point where a car could detect and alert an occupant about a looming health risk.

Sam Abuelsamid, principal analyst at research firm Guidehouse Insights, is skeptical. To him, there is one crucial technology development element missing with such systems – consumer desire. Top-down mandates from authorities will help, yet these are never as powerful as groundswells from a hungry public.

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