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Breath alcohol interlock systems are used in Europe and the U.S. for drunk driving offenders, and a certain effect has been revealed in the prevention of drunk driving. Nevertheless, problems remain to be solved with commercialized detectors, i.e., a person taking the breath alcohol test must strongly expire to the alcohol detector through a mouthpiece for every test, more over the determination of the breath alcohol concentration requires more than 5 seconds. The goal of this research is to develop a device that functions suitable and unobtrusive enough as the interlock system. For this purpose, a new alcohol detector, which does not require a long and hard blowing to the detector through a mouthpiece, has been investigated. In this paper, as a tool available on board, a contact free alcohol detector for the prevention of drunk driving has been developed.

In recent years, requests for automotive comfort are increasing, and the development of seats that cause little fatigue, even for long distance driving, has been required. Until now, seat riding comfort has been studied mainly using dynamic vibration analysis; and there are few studies that give importance to the sensory characteristics of the driver and passengers. In order to apply to the design of comfortable seating, we developed a new seat evaluation method that emphasizes the interaction between the human body and seat. For static seating comfort, we determined seat compliance as a new evaluation index by using a human body pressure distribution that is calculated by dividing the seat into 16 segments, and is related to seat flexion. For dynamic riding comfort, speed of the human body pressure distribution, and the acceleration of each human body part were made into an index.