Ford's New Vibrating Baseball Cap Will Stop Drivers Driving Tired

Are you a trucker? Do you have a problem with tiredness behind the wheel? If the answer to either of these questions is yes, then boy, do we have some good news for you.

Ford Brazil’s Heavy Truck division (which just rebadges Iveco trucks, as far as we can tell) has created this: the Safe Cap. It’s a baseball cap-style piece of wearable tech that detects drowsiness and alerts drivers with lights, sounds and vibrations if it thinks they’re getting sleepy. Basically it’s a child’s learning aid you can wear on your head.

Having witnessed in two separate Seat Leon long-termers how utterly useless the current in-car tiredness-detection systems are, this had better be an improvement or it’ll soon find itself turned off and/or tossed out of the window.

Ford carried out a study to identify the differences in the movements of well-rested truckers and tired ones, as well as the difference between drowsy movements and those associated with normal operation of the truck.

That data was fed into the control processor in the hat, which has an accelerometer and gyroscope to measure actual inputs. Prototype caps were then tested intermittently by a panel of actual truckers over eight months and 3000 miles.

The Brazilian National Transport Confederation carried out research in 2016 that found 60 per cent of truck drivers considered their job to be dangerous. They drove around 6000 miles per month and some 45 per cent had been offered illegal or dubious alertness-enhancing drugs. The cap is probably a better idea, we think.