You're in rush hour traffic, and your neck tenses up, shoulders are hiked up to your ears, and your lower back is in a knot; your heart's resting rate is 180, and you've just shouted at an old lady who just inadvertently cut you off. Suddenly, your seat begins to shift and vibrate, sending a soothing massage to your muscles that immediately calms you down. Your heart rate lowers to a cool 65 beats per minute, and you feel your shoulders moving down to where they should be. The whites of your knuckles clutching the steering wheel dissipate to their usual pinkish hue. Sounds too good to be true? Hey--c'mon! This is the 21st Century--of course it's not!
Faurecia Active Wellness had designed a car seat that does just that tracks a drivers sleepiness or stress and delivers countermeasures to alleviate it. The Faurecia website says it all:
The Faurecia Active WellnessTM seat employs unique types of sensors to detect the heart, breathing rhythm of drivers and/or occupants and other data based on the most recent medical research. It then provides a very specific massage pattern, along with air flow through the seat’s ventilation system, either to re-energize a tired occupant or to relax a stressed individual, making life on board a more healthy experience.
So here we have a carseat that tracks the driver's stress levels, then mitigates them through various forms of stimuli.
It sounds like a great idea--who wouldn't want a seat to do that; and yes, it could drive down incidents of road rage and other driver stress related accidents.
However, as we've read in other posts in this blog, there are always trade-offs for such comforts. Like the autonomous car in which the driver gives up his/her own autonomy and desire to mechanically control the vehicle, this seat on the surface sounds like a dream, but under the surface could in fact be a nightmare.
Imagine this: the information the seat gathers from you being sent to a third party, whether your government, your doctor, your insurance broker, or even your employer? Imagine if you were put into stress management classes, or given a fine, or lost that promotion simply because your car seat delivered the goods on your very bad day? We all have stress. A simple walk through the public library will show you entire aisles of books on work-related stress. But till now it's something private, untraceable by your vehicle, and nobody else's business but those whom you choose to let into your life. And of course the info will be sent to a third party--you can guarantee that. And in these times of hyper-awareness of psychological and emotional issues, it's very easy for one to have a simple bad day and suddenly become pathologized.
The seat sounds wonderful--don't get me wrong. But not when it holds such powerful information about my cognitive and emotional states; and not when the threat looms for third parties to become privy to that information.
One day we'll all look back at the old Buick Regales and Oldsmobile 98 and dream of being able to drive without recourse or being tracked by the driver's seat. Those cars that now seem cheesy and old will indeed be collectively salivated upon.
The time's a comin' just around that bend....
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