We are pleased to announce the award of our latest award of a grant from Innovative UK, the UK's Innovation Agency. We share the grant with our partner Fuell Limited to develop a production-ready prototype of a personalised Driver Monitoring System (pDMS) that will meet EuroNACP's 2025 Roadmap requirements for "driver monitoring systems that effectively detect impaired and distracted driving".

The innovative personalised Driver Monitoring System is a world first. It collects real-time data from multiple sources, including the driver's wearable, driver-facing camera, and vehicle computer. This creates a picture of the drivers' health before the journey even starts. The system learns the driver's personal baseline and constantly evolves over time, measuring fatigue, inattention, and distraction.

According to Euro NACP and the European Road Safety Observatory, human error causes the majority of vehicle accidents, and 20% of accidents cite driver fatigue. Driver distraction is a global problem, costing billions and taking lives.

As a result of this grant, the production-ready prototype will include the ability to detect driver distraction based on head position and gaze direction, a machine-learning approach combining all channels of data to deliver a weighted decision model, and a working production prototype of the integrated solution ready to be deployed at scale.

Our partner in collaboratively developing this game-changing system, Fuell Limited, is a fast-track start-up launched to develop and exploit the market for the detection of drowsiness, using Photoplethysmography (PPG) in wearables and then later remote PPG, using cameras.

Tim Brownstone – KYMIRA CEO and Founder said:

"We're really excited to continue our partnership with Fuell, working with them to translate our technology from smart clothing into smart vehicles in order to widen the impact of our technologies and save more lives. The partnership with Fuell brings to bear our combined expertise and know-how to give a joint offering whose value is greater than the sum of its parts."

John Stuart, COO of Fuell said:

"Our goal is to see Fuell's personalised Driver Monitoring System ("pDMS") in every vehicle, either as a retrofit or as part of a new car offering. Aside from providing a system that is likely to be a legal requirement for new cars, an effective pDMS will save on insurance costs for high-risk drivers and lead to fewer lost driver days and other social costs of a road accident bill that is estimated in excess of £16bn pa in the UK alone. This grant will help deliver the Fuell personalised Driver Monitoring System – the most complete system available globally."

Throughout the timeline of the grant, Fuell will project manage and focus on the overall solution, the driver distraction detection solution, and the development of the multi-sensor machine learning prediction algorithm. We at KYMIRA will adapt their patented smart biomonitoring specifically for use in a vehicle setting and will enable detection of an ECG signal whenever the driver has their hands on the steering wheel.

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