Philips and OmniVision have introduced a prototype of the world’s first in-cabin connected well-being monitoring solution at AutoSens Europe, taking place this week in Barcelona, Spain.
The system monitors vitals such as pulse and breathing rate, which could be used to customize settings while driving, such as intelligently adapting media, climate, lighting, seating, engine modes, scent and other settings. It could also be used to support the delivery of notifications or make adaptive route and break suggestions for the driver.
Ritesh Agarwal, senior automotive marketing manager, OmniVision, said, “We have partnered with Philips, a renowned health and well-being technology software provider, to develop a vital signs monitoring solution particularly tailored to the automotive industry, which has the potential to be connected to the comfort and safety settings of the car. This in-cabin solution will bring added value to automotive consumers and shorten time to market for Tier 1 automotive OEMs.”
Laurens Pronk, business development manager EMEA, Philips, said, “Philips has over 20 years of experience in developing and clinically validating patented vital signs monitoring algorithms for various sensor technologies.”
The prototype combines Philips’s vital signs camera for automotive software with OmniVision’s OX05B1S CMOS image sensor, a 5MP RGB-IR backside-illuminated (BSI) global shutter sensor for in-cabin monitoring systems.
The image sensor features Nyxel technology, which uses novel silicon semiconductor architectures and processes to achieve quantum efficiency at the 940nm near-infrared (NIR) wavelength. This helps the OX05B1S detect and recognize objects that other image sensors would miss under low lighting conditions, providing better performance in-cabin camera capabilities. An advanced AI-enabled OAX4600 image signal processor seamlessly processes the data from the image sensor for the med-tech system.
