When your car measures your heart rate

23 October 2025

The German government wants to reduce the number of traffic fatalities by 40 percent by 2030, while also ensuring that significantly fewer people are seriously injured in accidents. As Germany moves towards “Vision Zero”, new health assistants, such as those being developed by researchers and tested at the Charité hospital in Berlin, could have their part to play in this alongside emergency braking assistants, pedestrian detection and a safer cycling infrastructure. A recent study by the Innovation Institute has identified which of these systems are deemed especially promising by specialists from the medical and automotive industries and TÜV NORD Mobilität.

We spend an average of 43 minutes per day behind the wheel of a car. Time that could sensibly be used for preventive healthcare, says Thomas Deserno, director of the Institute of Medical Informatics (PLRI): “The integration of continuous health monitoring has great potential when it comes to the early detection of disease.” Automotive Health is the name of the principle which is being worked on by research institutes such as the PLRI, alongside various car makers. The aim is to prevent accidents, improve the health of drivers and, ideally, ensure that they reach their destination in a more relaxed state than when they set out.

The researchers from PLRI gave onlookers an advance insight into what this might look like in November 2024 at the “Medica” medical technology trade fair in Düsseldorf: What looked from the outside like a normal VW ID.4 was packed full of technology to comprehensively record the vital parameters of its drivers, enabling the vehicle to detect the symptoms of strokes and heart attacks at an early stage.

Cardiovascular diseases are the most common cause of death in Germany and can also have fatal consequences for other road users. As recently as January of this year, three people were killed and two seriously injured in a traffic accident in Düsseldorf. And this was not an isolated case. According to the GDV insurer accident database, health problems are a factor in about one percent of car accidents in Germany. The proportion of fatal accidents is about four percent. This is a problem that medical informatics specialist Thomas Deserno and his team are tackling with the cardiovascular assistant they have installed in their smart car: the steering wheel doubles as an ECG test device, the seatbelt records the sounds of the heart, the car seat measures body temperature and an internal camera films the driver’s face as a means of calculating their respiration rate. All these data are collected and analysed by a neural network.

The idea is for anomalies such as more frequent or prolonged atrial fibrillation to be detected at an early stage and strokes or heart attacks to be prevented by issuing a timely warning. As far as more than 60 per cent of the 74 experts from the medical sector, the automotive industry and TÜV NORD Mobilität who were surveyed by the Innovation Institute on automotive health concepts are concerned, cardiovascular assistants are the most sensible new vehicle feature in the quest to prevent accidents. 41 percent of them would consider the additional costs involved in buying a vehicle with this feature worthwhile.

For many frequent drivers, their cars are a mobile living room. But even if our cars have become more spacious over the last few decades, they are still much smaller than domestic living rooms. Which means that they also have less air in them. Especially when the car is full, for example on a weekend trip or holiday journey, the oxygen content of the air in the interior drops quickly – and with it the oxygen content in the blood of the occupants. This leads to fatigue and lack of concentration, and the risk of accidents grows accordingly.

One of the proposed health assistants features a measuring device in the steering wheel or smartwatch that checks the oxygen concentration inside the car. If it is too low, the device reacts accordingly by notifying the driver or changing the air conditioning setting. This increases driver alertness, which over 50 percent of the experts surveyed believe could reduce the risk of accidents.

How well we concentrate and what we can do physically is also down to our blood sugar levels. If their blood sugar falls precipitously, people with diabetes can suffer from dizziness, confusion and, in the worst case, loss of consciousness. To monitor their blood sugar levels, most diabetics use a drop of blood from their fingertip and a measuring device. On a car journey, this means heading for a service station, pricking their finger and testing their blood sugar before their journey can continue. A less stressful alternative to taking blood in this way is to use special sensors inserted into the subcutaneous fatty tissue. Once the measured values are fed into the on-board computer, the driver’s blood sugar level can be shown on the vehicle display, which is much easier to read than a smart watch display, for instance. This will allow people with diabetes to plan breaks and food intake properly and keep their blood sugar levels in the green zone even on longer journeys, a development which almost 48 percent of the study participants rate as helpful.

Driving a car is inevitably a sedentary activity. And all too often we don’t sit as well as we might. This puts a strain on the spine and back and can lead to acute pain, especially on longer journeys. Based on sensors in the seat, for example, the on-board computer could provide information on poor posture and suggest alternative seating positions. Active seats might go even further by giving the driver a direct helping hand, providing tactile feedback and thereby encouraging the adoption of a better posture or automatically intervening to improve it after a certain driving time. This would head off posture-related damage and back pain. In the case of existing conditions such as a herniated disc, the posture assistants could configure the seat to the best possible effect as soon as the driver gets into the car. Over 60 percent of the experts surveyed would therefore consider it worth paying more for a vehicle to have these assistants.

In a next stage, the data from the various health assistants could then be pooled and evaluated using AI-supported systems to generate a real-time analysis of the driver’s physical condition and provide personalised health recommendations. Acute emergencies could thus be detected and the long-term physical and psychological consequences of driving stress counteracted.

“Combining data analysis and artificial intelligence offers enormous potential for improving both road safety and the well-being of car users,” says Leif-Erik Schulte, director of the Institute of Automotive Technology and Mobility (IFM) at TÜV NORD. “If we’re going to implement this vision, however, researchers and industry will have to work even more closely together while also ensuring the highest data protection standards,” the vehicle safety expert stresses. Extensive tests and validations will also be required to ensure the reliability and safety of the various health assistants.

The first steps have already been taken a study by BMW and the Charité hospital in Berlin, which started in June 2025. With the aid of 120 test subjects aged 50 and over, a cardiovascular assistant is being tested here. Some of the subjects are healthy, while others are suffering from various diseases such as cardiac arrhythmia.

The study is still in a very early phase, with the first results expected at the end of the year. If they are promising, this would open the door to the long-term goal of the cooperation partners: to install a reaction chain in vehicles that would not only apply an emergency brake in the event of an acute emergency but also inform the emergency services and send them the recorded health data – allowing the helpers on site to immediately initiate the necessary measures.