Skip to main content

With CabinSense, cars will soon know who’s riding in them and respond accordingly

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Whether it’s cabin temperature or the selection and volume of music, everyone has their own specific tastes when it comes to driving. What if your car could magically know not only who was in the driver’s seat, but also in every seat in the vehicle, and choose an option that’s likely to be satisfactory to everyone? That’s what Israel-based company Eyesight Technologies promises with its newly announced CabinSense in-car Occupancy Monitoring System.

Using A.I. technology, the system is capable of recognizing the number and placement of passengers in a car, as well as their age, gender, and the presence of any child seats through an onboard camera. It can either approximate this information — and presumably use it to make generalizations — or recognize the faces to specific users.

It’s not just about things like temperature or media choices, either. The system could also be used as a safety option. For example, it can detect whether passengers are wearing their seat belts properly. It could also disable certain airbags in cases where they might cause more harm than help — such as in the case of a child’s seat, or side airbags that could potentially harm elderly passengers.

Cabin Sense demo

“We use computer vision, essentially giving the car the ability to see the occupants just like we humans do,” Tal Krzypow, vice president of Product Management for Eyesight, told Digital Trends. “It’s like a mom reminding their kid to sit properly or wear their seatbelt correctly so that they’re protected. It’s like your partner pointing out the bag you almost forgot in the backseat. It’s like you realizing that, with the kids in the back seat, the temperature should be a tad higher, the volume a bit lower, and the playlist more cheerful.”

Ultimately, it will be up to car manufacturers as to how they deploy this technology. “CabinSense’s capabilities are only limited by the imagination, and the capacity of the car manufacturer,” Liat Rostock, who handles marketing for the technology, told us.

As of now, Eyesight Technologies is offering this as a solution to be built into new cars, as opposed to one that can be retrofitted by users like an aftermarket accessory. Krzypow said that this is because CabinSense is most beneficial when integrated with the car’s safety and infotainment systems, something that would presumably be more than a little tough for your average customer to figure out themselves.

Is this the dream of ultra-personalization come to life? Is it overly intrusive technology you’d rather steer clear of? Some combination of the above? The only thing we know for sure is that it’s on its way.

Editors' Recommendations

Luke Dormehl
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more