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What if your next fitness wearable weighs about 3500 pounds?
It's not entirely unlikely as more and more technology companies are deciding the inside of a car Can be a wellness monitoring tool.
Faurecia here is a good example.
They call this their Active Wellness seat technology.
I am right now sitting on a sensor.
It looks like a seat, but in the bottom cushion is a sensor.
You can call it a **** sensor, because it's using my rump to figure out my heart rate and my respiration.
And then the tricky part is doing a very complicated signal to noise process to take out all the vehicles vibration and bumping.
It all get reported up somewhere in the dash like on this mock up.
There's my heart rate, there's my respiration rate right there.
Below that they're able to use another algorithm to figure out if I'm stressed right now or if I'm sleeping.
In the middle's fine, but either those extremes, it can then do some kind of eat therapy on me.
A combination of massage, heat and cooling, could be used to wake me up, if it's a really vigorous massage with cooling.
Or calm me down maybe, if it's a more calm massage.
Some other factors that you can deal with once you have this data [INAUDIBLE] You can send that off to a medical professional.
You can also mux that data together with what's coming off your FitBit, for example, to get more accurate data overall.
Interesting wrinkle on crash detection.
What if, when a collision is detected, they don't just send the severity of the crash and the location, but they can also send My heart rate and respiration emergency responders.
They know a little bit more what they're going to get in there once they arrive here than if they don't have that data.
And then from this of course automakers can decide to extend that more.
They can tap into a sensing seat like this to do their own sort of response systems for different moods.
Also make it part of a holistic, almost intuitive Sport mode or comfort mode, for the overall drive train, depending on what mood you bring to the car.
That would be on the OEM's plate to do that.
By the way, the medical grade sensors behind this technology are already in use in hospital beds to measure certain patient parameters.
Jaguar sees using them as part of a platform Called MindSense.
In addition to reading brainwaves, it also envisions a biometric seat to read heart rate and respiration rate, particularly to better know how to alert the driver of a future autonomous Jaguar when they need to take control again.
The Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology in Tokyo was several years ago working on a Seat tech that reads the contures of your rump to identify you basically a **** print to get access to the car.
And a few years ago Ferrari applied for a patent on seat technology that would go beyond measuring heart and respiration by adding brain waves measured by a head rest sensors.
In the aim of better tailoring the cars drive mode to the drivers mental Clearly the day is coming when car seats will do a lot more than just keep you off the floor.
More car tech de-mystified right now at CNETOnCars.com.
Click on car tech 101.
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