On average, at least 38 children die every year in the United States alone because of being locked in cars parked under the sun according to the National Safety Council reports.
This team of engineers set out to make this tragedy a thing of the past with their state-of-the-art technology breakthrough!
A team of about a dozen Toyota engineers has been working tirelessly on a project for the last 2.5 years that they believe will change vehicles as we know them.
Driven by their passion to make cars safer for everyone, the engineers dedicated their time to developing a technology that would help people save the lives of children and animals; basically any living thing!
“It’s become a mission as opposed to just a job,” Simon Roberts said, the Managing Engineer at Toyota said.
The group of engineers wants to make the statistic we all know into a thing of the past.
The technology, called Cabin Awareness, does not just detect human beings but can detect any living thing. In the past, technology has relied on cameras to identify humans left inside a car for too long or weigh scales that detect something heavy on the seat.
But this technology is designed to pay attention to and recognize micro-movements like breathing and heartbeats!
So if you forgot a bag of groceries or your gym bag in the car, you won’t be alerted. But if a living being is in the car, it will set off a series of alarms. The first series is your car’s horn going off as well as the headlights flashing.
If you still do not hear or see your car, you get a text message alert or a call from the car’s system.
While the system has not been rolled out to vehicles yet, they plan on releasing it soon and hope it will one day be a technology used in every car.
“Obviously we are developing this for Toyota and Lexus, but this is something potentially as what we are calling our Volvo moment. Where, they invented the three-point safety harness, the seatbelt that we all have today in every single vehicle,” Roberts recalled.
He went on to stress the fact that this technology would not be safeguarded by the company, as they want every car manufacturer to have it for the betterment of humanity. “This is something that came out of the Hackathon as part of a social good and innovation movement that we would like to see adopted everywhere,” Roberts said.
This technology will truly save so many lives! We hope soon all cars are programmed with it.
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