Why this is interesting: Volvo has carefully chosen the words to describe its new safety system. It's right to.
In March 2019, Atif Rafiq, then Volvo's Chief Digital Officer and Global Chief Information Officer, made some pretty startling proclamations about Volvo's intention to offer driver monitoring cameras.
According to Rafiq:
‘Driver-facing cameras will become an option in our cars next year... They’re very advanced these days: they can determine a driver’s glucose levels by looking at their pupils, so could call a loved one or hospital if it detected a health problem. Cars will understand your state and destress you on your way back from work.’ 1
In 2019, we were still in the midst of the unfolding scandal of Cambridge Analytica's misuse of Facebook data in service of Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. It was also the year Shoshana Zuboff published The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and, in popular culture, the BBC/Netflix series Black Mirror had been making clear the consequences of surveillance run amok. On this issue, emotions were running hot. I can still remember reading Rafiq's quotes and thinking that his bullishness was uncharacteristic for a Volvo exec. I also remember thinking that, in the current climate, this would not end well.
And sure enough, within days, a Volvo spokesperson retracted his comments and provided corrections to the story, stating that:
Mr. Rafiq was factually incorrect in his statement and clarified things further by saying "Volvo Cars does not have any plans for driver facing cameras or related features this year." Furthermore, Volvo says the features described below are "only at concept stage" and could be available "some years from now."2 3
As advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) like automatic lane-keeping and adaptive cruise control proliferate, the need for a camera-based system to determine the driver's visual attention is now beyond question. Alternative approaches, such as Tesla's, determine driver awareness based the presence of the driver's hands on the steering wheel. But in Tesla's case, it's a system that's easily fooled by hanging weights from the steering wheel4). This enables the dangerous misuse of Tesla's Autopilot and Full Self-driving systems, to the extent that they have been implicated in a number of fatal accidents in which driver inattention have been blamed.
So as ADAS becomes more common, and more sophisticated, it's natural that Volvo, a brand that's built its reputation on passenger safety, would eventually launch a more sophisticated system to monitor driver attention. Four years after their last attempt, the company is once again talking about cameras in the car. But this time, they're doing it differently.
The industry term for in-car attention detection is Driver Monitoring System, or DMS for short. Now, what comes to mind when you think of monitoring? For me, it conjures images of a nurse checking my vitals beside a hospital bed, or the kind of state and corporate surveillance of which I've become only too aware during a decade working in technology. In short, monitoring sounds about as human, and as helpful to the monitored, as Mark Zuckerberg answering questions at a Senate committee hearing.
Volvo, in their wisdom, has chosen another, far more human way to describe their technology. They call it a Driver Understanding System.
No doubt conscious of their previous missteps, and with a heightened awareness of data privacy concerns among consumers, it's a clever and far more positive reframing of what still amounts to a couple of video cameras pointed at the driver's face.
The scope of the data collection has also, at least in the PR message, been dramatically scaled back. Gone is talk of authentication, video conferencing and health monitoring. This new system is simply there to see if the driver is focussing too hard (which happens when they're drunk) or not enough (like when they're using a phone, or a crappy user interface...5).
As Andrew Clews pointed out6, the words "could" and "might" do a lot of heavy lifting in the videos describing technology. But if Volvo can (re)build trust in this technology, and if it works as, and only as promised, then it could help revolutionise7 automotive safety. Which would be a very Volvo thing to do.
https://www.carmagazine.co.uk/car-news/tech/volvo-driver-cameras/
https://www.motor1.com/news/299493/volvo-introducing-driver-facing-cameras/
Incidentally, Rafiq's LinkedIn profile shows him leaving Volvo in May of 2019.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/22/22397546/tesla-autopilot-consumer-report-test-no-driver
https://twitter.com/CasperKessels/status/1572985304809619464?s=20&t=SO9iogs5aVIM3pIMOGVypA
https://twitter.com/CrackedW_Screen/status/1573006884940185600?s=20&t=SO9iogs5aVIM3pIMOGVypA
Volvo isn't the first to offer camera-based driver attention monitoring. GM offers it as part of its Super Cruise service, and Subaru launched its DriverFocus system in 2019. Volvo is, however, the first, to my knowledge, to be able to determine from which kind of inattention the driver is suffering: the drunk kind, or the texting kind.