Patent ID: 7639148

Claim:
A method for assessing a traveling vehicle driver's level of inattentiveness caused by excessive workload due to the driver's performance of secondary tasks and responsively adapting a vehicle motion control subsystem based thereupon, said method comprising: taking a series of measurements of a driver's head or eye movement variability and inputting the measurements to a computer processor for analysis; analyzing the input measurements using the computer processor and determining therefrom whether an excessive amount of driver attention is being paid to a secondary task based on an assessment of driver workload; detecting a decrease in driving control task performance occurring simultaneously with the excessive driver workload; and preventing engagement of or disengaging the vehicle motion control subsystem based upon said assessment of the driver's excessive level of workload and the detected simultaneous decrease in driving control task performance, thereby assuring that behavior of the traveling vehicle appropriately matches the driver's present level of attentiveness to driving control tasks.