Drowsiness behind the wheel poses a significant risk, contributing to thousands of accidents and hundreds of fatalities annually, with drowsy drivers being three times more prone to causing crashes. To address these dangers, fleet managers are increasingly employing artificial intelligence to monitor driver fatigue on the road.

Samsara has introduced a new Drowsiness Detection technology, which underwent testing with 50 early adopters since July and is now available across the industry. The technology boasts a 77% success rate in identifying drowsy driving incidents. This software leverages extensive training on over 10 trillion data points and 38 billion minutes of video footage to power its AI-driven fatigue detection.

"It's challenging to accurately pinpoint when someone is truly drowsy. It's not just a single behavior, like yawning or closing one's eyes. Drowsiness can be less frequent than other risky driving behaviors, making accurate detection dependent on the quality of data used to feed and train AI models," stated Evan Welbourne, vice president of AI and Data at Samsara, in a press release.

Drowsy driving is a major safety concern. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) attributes approximately 91,000 crashes annually to this issue, resulting in around 50,000 injuries and 800 deaths. However, these figures may underestimate the problem, as recent studies indicate that between 2017 and 2021, up to 17.6% of fatal crashes involved fatigued drivers, leading to an estimated 29,834 fatalities. The trucking industry...