In-Cabin Sensing Goes Central: How Driver and Occupant Monitoring Is Being Rebuilt on One Node | ItInsightsWorld
Interior monitoring in modern vehicles is being re-plumbed as an integration problem rather than an optics problem. Instead of scattering lenses toward individual seats, manufacturers are consolidating what were previously separate sensing jobs into a single central hub — a shift reported from BARCELONA, Spain, where cabin technology dominated the agenda at AutoSens Europe 2026.
Davide Maggi, project officer at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), describes automakers as merging distinct sensing tasks into unified central systems. The benchmark in his account is the five-star safety rating threshold: OEMs want the score without the prohibitive cost of installing multiple optical cameras throughout the vehicle cabin.
Davide Maggi during a panel at AutoSens Europe 2026 (Source: AutoSens)
A decade of column-mounted optics gives way
Driver distraction was handled for nearly a decade in one predictable way: an optical sensor placed directly behind the steering wheel. That position hands algorithms an unobstructed view of the driver’s eyes and face, which is what makes blinking, gaze shifts and fatigue markers readable at all.
“Ten years ago, when we started seeing the first driver monitoring systems, they were all steering column-based—most of them, except for Tesla, which was the only one adding an RGB camera in the center top,” Maggi told EE Times during an interview at AutoSens.
Streamlining interior electronics and cutting component counts is now displacing that dedicated architecture. The lens that once stared only at the driver is migrating toward the rearview mirror or into the center dashboard display, where it can watch driver and passengers simultaneously.
“It seems like everyone is moving away from a driver monitoring system just facing the driver and pointing toward a camera in the center,” Maggi said. A single centrally mounted device, he noted, “can also provide both driver monitoring and occupant monitoring across the entire front and rear cabin.”
What consolidation buys — and what it costs optically
| Design attribute | Column-mounted arrangement | Central in-cabin arrangement |
|---|---|---|
| Typical location | Behind the steering wheel | Near the rearview mirror or embedded in the center dashboard display |
| Who is covered | The driver only | Driver and occupants, front and rear cabin |
| Geometry | Direct line to eyes and face | More oblique angle, so subtle facial movement is harder to track |
| Failure mode | Duplicate hardware per task | Line-of-sight obstruction from head turns and headwear |
| Cost posture | Multiple optical cameras distributed in the cabin | One central camera, with radar substituted for a second optical assembly |
Maggi framed the geometric penalty as a coverage-budget problem. “Having the camera up there and moving from a two-camera system—one for DMS and one for occupant monitoring—to one that does both has its own challenges,” he said. “The blanket is this size: If you pull it from one side, some other part will go uncovered .”
Obstruction is the second exposure. “In this case, if you put the camera up there, whenever you lose accuracy in tracking where the driver is looking when he moves his head to this side, basically half of the face is gone,” Maggi said. Everyday clothing and accessories compound it: “with the headwear, it could be getting tricky, because if you’re wearing a hat or anything, some blockage might occur .”
Physical limits remain wherever light simply does not reach, such as an infant asleep under a heavy blanket or positioned below the camera’s line of sight.
Radar is written into the same bus
Suppliers are pairing the central camera with in-cabin radars rather than adding secondary optical assemblies, Maggi said. Short-range millimeter-wave radar and ultra-wideband sensing systems can register subtle motion, including a sleeping child’s breathing, through fabrics and other materials.
“It’s interesting that now it’s going back to having one-size-fits-all from a technology side,” Maggi said of the move toward centralized cabin architectures. “And the new part is that most of them—actually, I think all of them—are also embedding radar monitoring systems to detect what the camera cannot see .”
One central camera plus radars lets Tier 1 automotive suppliers serve driver monitoring and child presence detection at the same time. System developers at the conference demonstrated integration paths that combine visual video feeds with real-time radar point-cloud data.
“I’ve seen some of them already providing a high-level vision combining camera and radar; others just provide a visual of what they get from the point-cloud data,” Maggi said. “It’s fascinating. It’s supposed to be a lot cheaper than mounting cameras to monitor everything .”
Assessment protocols set the engineering agenda
Test criteria from the European New Car Assessment Programme, known as Euro NCAP, sit close to this acceleration: expanded protocols for 2026 have been introduced, with further changes outlined for 2029 that evaluate driver state monitoring, driver impairment detection and child presence detection.
At the Joint Research Centre, Maggi’s work involves embedding human factors principles into European regulatory frameworks, and he stressed how strongly the ratings steer engineering decisions.
“For sure, cost is one thing,” Maggi said. “I don’t know what influence that Euro NCAP has had in these choices, because now in Euro NCAP you can see that for 2026 and 2029 you have more requirements for driver monitoring and occupant monitoring especially, which was not there some years ago .”
European car buyers weigh those ratings when selecting new vehicles, so automakers prioritize clearing the test criteria efficiently over deploying elaborate, proprietary monitoring hardware.
“I don’t know if manufacturers now see that there’s no profitability in having a high-end driver monitoring system,” Maggi noted. “Because the only thing that matters is actually getting five stars on Euro NCAP.”
Two regulatory lanes: assistance versus automation
European authorities are also drawing harder boundaries between driver-assistance features and fully automated driving systems. To keep drivers from misreading vehicle capabilities, regulations strictly separate driver control assistance systems (DCAS) from automated driving systems (ADS).
“Regulatory-wise, the first thing that we tried to do is to separate levels of automation as they are defining a level, completely discarding the SAE [levels of driving automation] definition and really going into the details of what is an ADS and how it should be regulated, versus what is an assistant system,” Maggi explained.
Under those guidelines an automated system cannot abruptly transfer control into assistance modes. “DCAS regulation and ADS regulation are two very separate things,” Maggi said, and automated regulations specify “that there cannot be a transition from a Level 4 system to a Level 2 system, to avoid any more confusion happening with the driver not knowing the capability of the system in the vehicle .”
Read together, the cabin redesign and the rulebook tell the same story: monitoring has become a centralized, multi-modal data problem, and its architecture is dictated less by what a single lens can see than by what one fused node can demonstrate to an assessment protocol — and only then to the person in the driver’s seat.