ALEXANDRIA, Va., Feb. 11 -- United States Patent no. 12,545,281, issued on Feb. 10, was assigned to Ford Global Technologies LLC (Dearborn, Mich.).
"Vehicle operator monitoring" was invented by Sophia Dancel (Rochester Hills, Mich.), Andrew Vaccariello (Canton, Mich.) and Levasseur Tellis (Southfield, Mich.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A computer in a vehicle can determine a monitoring time and an attentiveness window. Upon detecting attentiveness of an operator for the duration of the attentiveness window, the monitoring time is increased by an adjustment increment and a counter is incremented. Upon detecting inattentiveness of the operator during the duration of the attentiveness window, ...