LaVonda Brown was working on her doctorate in electrical engineering in Atlanta a few years ago when she made a discovery that's now being reviewed by the auto industry.
Her work at Georgia Tech involved developing a robotic educational agent — basically a robotic tutor to keep students engaged through the use of eye tracking. The program could monitor where the students were looking on a tablet during a math test, for instance.
She later went to Emory University and applied the technology to Alzheimer's research.
During her research, Brown said, she was living with someone with a drinking problem. "And I guess this is a career hazard, but I would analyze his eyes during the day, and then at night when they might be red and glossed over and slow to respond," Brown told Automotive News.
It occurred to her there were commercial needs for that technology.
"I assumed my work was going to be in the educational field," she said. "But I did some market research and saw that drug and alcohol screening was an important market."