Toyota’s latest safety plan? Watching your eyes

Close as we are to autonomous motoring becoming a reality, it’s probably going to be a good few years before your car ferries you home while you take a nap. As a kind of stop gap between now and that point, Toyota has patented eye-recognition technology that can tell your car when you’re tired.

The technology, it says, would detect the positions of your upper and lower eyelids and work out the degree to which your eyes are open. This technology would combine with the kind of red-eye detection technology which other automakers have already been working on.

Unlike other forms of red-eye detection, Toyota hopes that its system won’t get confused by patches of skin. Instead, the idea is that it’ll be able to know that the red-eye it’s detected is where skin should be and go back to looking for the accurate location of the eyes.

At this stage, it’s not exactly clear how Toyota would implement the technology, but it does seem fairly promising and more accurate data is always useful. Perhaps, like this Google Glass app, which beeps when it detects you’re getting tired and only stops doing so when you’ve pulled off to the side of the road for a rest.