How many times have you yawned and blinked eyes? Your Tesla knows

When it comes to innovating advanced automotive technologies, Tesla hardly has any match. The latest from the US electric car manufacturer comes in the form of an advanced river monitoring system that can detect and count how many times the driver has yawned and blinked his or her eyes. This advanced driver monitoring system is claimed to be able to track how drowsy the driver is.

The advanced driver monitoring system comes at a time when Tesla has been constantly criticized for not emphasising driver monitoring with its advanced driver-assist features under the Autopilot or Full Self-Driving (FSD) packages. A Tesla hacker has posted online that the automaker has introduced new car features that track yawns and eye blinks to ensure the driver is not drowsy. The car's system tracks these using the cabin-facing camera to ensure the driver is paying attention to the road ahead and not using a handheld device.

Looks like Tesla is planning a big boost to (camera based) driver monitoring.
They are now tracking additional things like how many yawns the driver had recently, how many blinks and how long they were, leaning. All this is to calculate how drowsy the driver is.

— green (@greentheonly) May 13, 2023

The Twitter user has further revealed that Tesla is tracking these metrics even when the drivers are fully awake and driving themselves. However, it is not clear what Tesla plans to do with the collected information. Also, it is not clear if Tesla has asked for permission to collect the data from the users.

As Tesla is aiming to deliver level 4 and level 5 autonomy in its cars in the coming future, the reason behind this data tracking is also hard to understand, and these metrics can be more useful for level 2 and 3 autonomy, which the automaker is not working on.

One possible reason behind this metric tracking could be that Tesla wants to improve its Autopilot system, which has been known for sending a wide number of alerts to the drivers to apply pressure to the steering wheel, in a bid to increase safety. An improved driver monitoring system can be used to reduce the number of alerts, which is known as Autopilot nag.