The inventors of the Novosibirsk company "Elron" have created a "Smart Watch" - a SleepControl device that allows monitoring the drivers condition and prevent them from falling asleep. The company's CEO Ivan Lebedev became a nominee for the "Man of the Year" award of the magazine "Delovoy Kvartal" for this invention in 2020.
Ivan Lebedev received Candidate of Sciences degree in High Voltage Electrophysics at Novosibirsk State Technical University NETI in 2012. In 2019 he founded an innovative company with a portfolio of 122 projects and 51,000 inventions and devices. Lebedev is the author of 12 patents (5 of which are patents for inventions).
In an interview to "Delovoy Kvartal", Ivan Lebedev said: "The idea of the SleepControl device came spontaneously, while I was taking part in the A:Start accelerator in Academpark. As an experienced driver, I had lots of situations when it was necessary to drive for a long time, and I always lacked an objective fatigue monitoring device or a gadget that could signal: "Stop, you need a rest, it's dangerous to continue driving".
The company "Elron" found out that on average 20-25% of incidents on the road abroad and in Russia occur due to drivers falling asleep, and realized that a fifth of the car accidents could have been prevented. Only in Russia this could help avoid more than 25 thousand accidents.
Strangely, there has been no successful solution for road transport drivers either here or abroad so far. Some developers suggest installing visual control cameras, but they can not be used for drivers with glasses and they also give false alarms due to the driver's turning head. Others offer cap-shaped control devices, which is problematic to use in the cold. Another idea is to place the device on fingers, but there is again a problem of using it in winter: they can not be used with gloves, and they easily fall off the fingers.
The result of the analysis is that the problem of drivers falling asleep does exist, but there are no effective solutions as for a single device.
While working on the project, Ivan Lebedev and his colleagues realized that it was possible to expand the boundaries of driver warning. That became an advantage of Elron in addition to a convenient and efficient device with no analogues.
SleepControl is a clock that allows monitoring the driver's condition. The device predicts the moment of falling asleep in the early stages: when the driver's eyes are still open, but he does not realize that he is beginning to fall asleep and his reaction speed decreases. If there is a risk of falling asleep, the device reports this by vibration, sound, and in an emergency situation — by an electric impact.
In addition to the short-term forecast for the driver falling asleep (a few minutes, which is present in some other company's devices), Ivan Lebedev's company added a medium-term forecast (some tens of minutes — which competitors devices lack). This allows taking some actions in advance. Short-term forecast is based on the analysis of electrodermal activity, medium-term forecast is based on the analysis of pulse characteristics.
At the end of 2020, the invention received funding from Foundation for Assistance to Small Innovative Enterprises (FASIE) under the START-1 grant for the development of the project. At the beginning of 2021, an application for an invention was submitted to the Federal Institute of Industrial Property, now it is being examined, and a patent is expected to be issued in the second half of the year.
Now the company is working on a new design of both the device itself in the form of a watch, and an additional unit supplied for transport companies: a transceiver device for informing dispatchers about the driver's condition.
The target price of the gadget is several thousand rubles for drivers and slightly higher for transport companies. In 2021, the company plans to pilot the devices and possibly have a limited market release.
"Our main goal is to provide drivers and transport companies with the possibility of objective control, thus increasing safety on our roads." the inventor says