A new roadside test is being developed that could help police identify drivers who are too tired to drive and keep them from getting back behind the wheel.
If the work on so-called smart glasses that is being carried out by a Victorian research team pays off, it could eventually see motorists asked to pop on a pair of the glasses to their eye movements and can be tracked and the length of their blinks measured. Apparently, this might help police identify drowsy drivers and prevent fatigue-related accidents.
With grey nomads being among the groups of long-distance drivers most susceptible to driver fatigue, and reseachers insist more could and should be done to combat the problem.
Professor Mark Howard, director of the Victorian Respiratory Support Service at Austin Hospital, told the ABC that the authorities’ ability to enforce alert driving had been hampered by not being able to measure drowsiness.
“Because we can’t measure it very well, we’ve only scratched the surface in terms of educating people about that risk,” he said. “There are actually signs that you’re starting to become drowsy and impaired, but people tend to ignore those and don’t relate them to having a higher risk of having a crash.”
Professor Howard said the new technology being developed could change drivers’ behaviour in the same way that other tests have been used to change behaviour with alcohol and drugs.
“We’ve never had any tools that can detect even severe levels of drowsiness,” he said. “We can change people’s behaviour by detecting that more severe level of impairment.”
Victoria Police said they would be following the research with interest.
According to the Sleep Health Foundation, a fifth of Australian adults have fallen asleep while driving and nearly a third drive while drowsy at least once a month.
·        Have you ever fought exhaustion to ‘just get a little further down the road’ or to try to reach that ‘really good campsite’ you’ve heard about? Comment below
Ridiculous device. So what. Governments urge you to stop and rest and give you hardly enough places to rest. Put more rest areas in before worrying about this
I agree with Dave Domm. And what are they going to do, make you stay on the shoulder of the road until you are not fatigued with your 4×4 and 6.5 metre caravan. If researchers “insist that more could and should be done to combat the problem” then Governments should build more appropriate infrastructure for rest stops. How many rest stops could they build for the millions of dollars they will spend on ‘smart’ glasses.
U want us to stop more, then stop making it illegal to stop
I Fully suport the comments above, and were do you draw the line. I am sure any driver who who spends the day in citty trafic will be fatigued by the end of the day, but they need to finish their shift.
There are so few places to stop for a nap in the southern states. Queensland is not so bad. So what will we do? Get a sleepy driver infringement? And then get told to move on and keep driving to the next sleeping bay 100 km down the road?
I was tired south of Bowen, pulled into rest area @ 10pm for a rest, council employee told me to move on or I’d be fined.