If the Driver Can’t Think, Maybe his CAR Can

You can’t yet buy a car that drives itself, but you’ll soon be able to get one that lets you know whether or not you’re a safe driver, by using biometric sensors to check on your vital signs, including pulse, breathing and "skin conductance," (sweaty palms–a sign of your emotional state). That information will then fed into the computer that controls your car’s safety systems, meaning that it might not let you start the car if it decides that you’re not healthy enough to drive.

Some Lexus models have built-in cameras to detect your driving behavior (but where do they send the images?), and some Mercedes-Benz cars have steering sensors that detect sleepiness. When this happens, the car sounds a warning beep or flashes a coffee-cup icon to suggest that it’s time to take a break. One sports car manufacturer plans to embed wireless electrodes in the driver’s headrest in order to monitor the drivers’ brain waves. BMW wants to connect a Bluetooth-equipped blood-sugar monitor.

These monitors could trigger the car’s safety systems to tap the brakes, turn the radio off or on, block a cell phone call. BMW is developing technology that would automatically stop the car if the driver suffered a heart attack. Eventually, these monitors could send information directly to a patient’s physician.

In the November 28th edition of the Wall Street Journal, Joseph B. White quotes Ford’s Jeff Greenberg as saying that phone-disabling technology could come to showrooms "relatively quickly." However, biometric sensors are "further out"–at least three to five years from being offered to consumers.

White quotes cardiologist Leslie Saxon as saying, "My car calls me when it needs something. I want patients’ cars to call them when they need blood-pressure medicine."

It’s not just important to drive right, it’s important to EAT right. If you suspect YOUR blood sugar is too high, because you’re gaining weight, then you need to download Anne Strieber’s famous diet book, which has now been REDUCED so that YOU can. When she found her clothes were getting too tight she thought they had all shrunk, until she realized she had gained weight due to Type II diabetes, a genetic condition that manifests in late middle age and makes it easy to gain weight and hard to lose it. She not only discovered WHY some of us have this gene, but what to do about it, and after three years of diet and exercise, she managed to lose 100 pounds–and YOU can too!