LAKELAND, Fla. -- St. Pete police are cracking down on distracted driving after a spike in deadly crashes in Polk County.
State troopers say a drowsy driver fell asleep at the wheel in October and pinned his SUV under a pickup truck.
Across the country, hundreds of thousands of people die every year in distracted driving and drowsy driving crashes.
A pair of seniors at Florida Polytechnic University are working on a high-tech solution to the problem.
“Even just a split second not looking at the road can really cause something very fatal,” said Lina Brihoum, a computer science major.
Brihoum and her classmate Eliezer Pla believe their class project could make our roads safer.
“If I look away from my camera, it can't detect my eyes, and it'll say 'pay attention,’” Pla explained.
The pair wrote the code for a program in which his computer's camera tracks the eyes of the person looking at it. If they close their eyes for more than a few seconds, the word 'Drowsy!' appears on the screen. If they look away completely -- for example, looking at his phone -- it says 'Pay attention!'.
The students want to put this technology in cars to sound an alarm when a driver takes their eyes off the road.
Right now, the students only have the prototype on their computer, but the end goal would be to use the camera on the driver’s phone, mounted to their windshield. They want to create a free app that anyone could download.
“The application will go ahead and start doing what you're seeing on my computer,” Pla said.
For now, the computer science majors' first concern is their grade, but they know the technology could save lives down the road.
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