Who needs face detection when your car can know who's sitting in it based on their rear-end? A group of Japanese researchers at the Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology (AIIT) have developed a car seat that can identify drivers while they're sitting down.
The way the technology works is pretty simple. The seat is retrofitted with 360 different sensors. Those sensors take into account things like your weight, the highest value of pressure on the seat, and where you come in contact with the seat. The idea is that we all sit in car seats relatively the same way each time, so the seat should be able to tell who is sitting in it, ensuring that the person is the owner of the car rather than a car thief.
While it seems like the tech might be problematic, the researchers claim the seat is able to accurately identify the person sitting in it 98 percent of the time. That's a pretty impressive accuracy rate, but it also means that one in every 50 times the seat would in theory not be able to recognize you, potentially resulting in your inability to drive your own car. It's also not clear how the seat would deal with things like weight loss or gain, the wearing of unusual clothing, or injuries that might effect how you sit down.
The AIIT researchers hope to work with car companies to bring the tech to vehicles as an anti-theft features in the next two to three years.
What do you think? Would you be interested in seat detection in your car?
Source: TechCrunch
