Toyota working on car technology that can predict heart attacks

Smart cars are the future of the automotive industry, and that’s evident with the push to have autonomous vehicles replace regular cars. However, what if cars were smart enough to tell if passengers are about to have a Heart Attack?

This is the future Toyota wants to make a reality, and it could change the way consumers buy cars.

Why is a car predicting heart attacks critical

Toyota’s Collaborative Safety Research Center believes a car being able to tell if its driver is about to have a heart attack is very important. A driver around the wheel suffering from a heart attack could cause a major accident that put many lives in danger.

The Japanese automotive giant wants to send $35 million during a five-year period that will last until 2021. The company has already begun working with several universities to find out if wearables could one day be as accurate when compared to medical equipment when it comes down to tell if there’s an impending heart attack.

Such a wearable would need the ability to determine if the driver’s blood sugar is low and if they could black out at any time.

According to the director of Toyota’s Collaborative Safety Research Center, Chuck Gulash, the team looked into conditions that might have caused road accidents from an emergency medical standpoint. The team also took the time to look at signals that wearables could measure.

Only 1.3 percent of all car accidents caused by medical emergency

The National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey shows that only 1.3 percent of all road accidents are caused by some form of medical emergency, this according to a 2009 survey. Nonetheless, it cannot be ignored since 1.3 percent means 26,000 crashes when one takes into consideration that the overall study speaks of 2 million accidents.

Now, as for medical emergency crashes, 11 percent is caused by Heart Attacks, which is approximately 2,680 crashes per year. 20 percent is caused by blackouts from drivers with diabetes, which is a significantly larger number.

Medical emergency accidents will become more common

Humans are living longer, which means, public roads will have older drivers than ever before. This is a problem since the majority of older drivers are over 65. Back in the year 2012, a number of drivers over the age of 65 on U.S. streets are around 43 million. This figure is set to double to 84 million come 2050.

Now, if and when Toyota brings heart attack detection abilities to its fleet of cars, drivers should never rely on their vehicles to tell if they are prone to having a heart attack. The best option is checking in with a doctor.