Growing regulatory and consumer demands around improving safety for all occupants is requiring OEMs to rethink their Occupancy Detection and Classification solutions. For years the same weight and force sensors have been used to depermine presence, but they are no longer good enough to meet the new benchmarks.

BMW recently commissioned a study to review different sensors solutions. The study included 96 different occupants,sitting in various positions. BMW invited Brighter Signals to be part of the study which mainly involved evaluating other established Tier 1 solutions.

The Brighter Signals technology uses tactile data of human interaction with the car interior surfaces to infer occupancy detection, classification and position. The 19 test results, show that Brighter Signals were able to detect and classify the occupant of the seat reliability over a number of test poses. Sensor fusion with other InCabin monitoring systens (eg camera) is now ongoing.