Cars are getting smarter and beginning to react on their own, but the gray matter manning the helm is still the vehicle's Achilles heel. So to really get inside a driver's head, automakers are going through their faces, analyzing expressions and muscle movements to determine whether the person at the wheel is too distracted, too tired or even too angry to safely control their ride. In conjunction with PSA Peugeot Citroën, scientists at the Transportation Center and Signal Processing 5 Laboratory of Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland are developing a technology that uses a camera to capture facial expressions and software to look for telltale signs of distraction as well as emotions that could indicate that the driver is not up to the task at hand. Think of it as a concerned co-pilot who can not only read your mood, but also take action before your mental condition clouds your driving decisions. "We aim at optimally exploiting computer vision technologies to improve safety and comfort in cars through more natural human-machine interfaces," Jean-Philippe Thiran, the director of EPFL's Signal Processing 5 Laboratory, told Wired.

And in the future, dashboard emotion detectors could search for signs of irritation in a bid to identify the first signs of road rage. A prototype of the device is able to read a driver's facial expressions using a tiny embedded camera. Scientists at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, developed the prototype device, which identifies a driver's emotions - including anger (pictured) - using an infrared camera placed behind the steering wheel to film their face Scientists at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, have developed the system which identifies which of the seven universal emotions a person is feeling: fear, anger, joy, sadness, disgust, surprise, or suspicion. They believe their technology could be of use in medicine, marketing, gaming and in driver safety. 'We know that in addition to fatigue, the emotional state of the driver is a risk factor, the researchers said.