First-ever demo of connected in-cabin vital signs monitoring

The in-cabin health and wellbeing system monitors vital signs such as pulse and breathing rate. The data may enable customisation of comfort settings while driving, such as intelligently adapting media, climate, lighting, seating, engine modes, scent and more. It will also help enable timed delivery of vehicle notifications or make adaptive route and break suggestions.  

“Automotive OEMs are continuously looking to add value and differentiate their brands by adding novel features that increase the comfort level in cars,” said Ritesh Agarwal, Senior Automotive Marketing Manager, OMNVISION.“As a leading supplier of image sensors for the automotive market, 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-one automotive OEMs.”

“By collaborating with OMNIVISION, we have demonstrated that camera sensors already available in the automotive industry are capable of accurately measuring vital signs such as pulse rate and breathing rate,” said Laurens Pronk, Business Development Manager EMEA, Philips. “Philips has over 20 years of experience in developing and clinically validating patented vital signs monitoring algorithms for various sensor technologies. We have partnered with OMNIVISION, an industry leader in in-cabin automotive image sensors, to leverage our joint capabilities and demonstrate this state-of-the-art technology during AutoSens Europe.”

The demonstrated prototype combines Philips’ vital signs camera for automotive software with OMNIVISION’s state-of-the-art OX05B1S CMOS image sensor, a 5-megapixel (MP) 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 the industry leading quantum efficiency at the 940nm near-infrared (NIR) wavelength. This enables the OX05B1S to detect and recognise objects that other image sensors would miss under extremely low lighting conditions, providing higher performance in cabin camera capabilities. An advanced artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled OAX4600 image signal processor seamlessly processes the data from the image sensor for the med-tech system.