These disturbing statistics have propelled us forward with developing the Safety Attention Monitor (SAM) for Drivers to help remedy car accidents and promote smarter driving. SAM utilizes a camera to detect and alert the driver (through audible "beeps" and LED lights) when he or she stops focusing on the road ahead. SAM notifies drivers in a variety of scenarios: when the driver looks over his or her shoulder for too long while merging onto a freeway, when the driver scrolls through his or her iPod for the next song to play, or when the driver discretely texts with their phone on their lap. Using OpenCV (open source computer vision library) we were able to develop a proof-of-concept application demonstrating these features in a portable scale on the Raspberry Pi with the Raspberry PiCam and desktop PC running Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2010.
Driving in this present day and age of emerging technology becomes more challenging for the everyday adult driver and especially for minors learning how to drive with a new permit. By creating an application that is easy to use for a non-technical person, remain unobtrusive to the driver's field of vision in their automobile, we hope to make our user's more conscious and aware of their current surroundings with the help of SAM.