Building Trust in Self-Driving Cars Through Biofeedback

It has been estimated that by 2025, there will be 20 million fully-autonomous self-driving cars on the road, but one major obstacle to reaching that number remains: nobody wants to use them. Studies show that 75 percent of Americans are afraid to ride in a self-driving vehicle. Now the people behind BraiQ, a new project from Columbia University, want to change this by teaching cars to better read human emotions. The group is developing a system to monitor human bio signals, show the car how they are feeling, and teach it how to respond. "We think as the AI advances, unless we can develop the rapport based on the interaction to teach them to gain mutual trust, humans and machines are not going to be able to interact well," Sameer Saproo, a scientist at Columbia University and a researcher on the project said.