The human brain is a funny thing. Get yourself in a shady situation, and it’ll pump you up with adrenaline in an effort to turn you temporarily superhuman. Touch something dangerously hot, and it’ll holler at the nervous system to move your hand before you’re even aware of your mistake. Put it behind a steering wheel on a long road at 2 A.M with the heater humming, though, and it starts to think that a 60 mph nap is a fantastic idea — then you wrap your car around a tree. Thanks a lot, brain.
The new Anti-sleep Pilot app for iPhone is built to help out when your brain falls short. Alas, the steep price tag will probably keep it from helping much of anything.
The first time you boot up the Anti-Sleep Pilot, you punch in a handful of details about yourself to build your “customized risk profile”. They throw these details into a big ol’ formula (taking into account stuff like the time of day [via the iPhone’s clock], the type of roads you’re driving on, your speed [via GPS], etc.), and from that try to work out just how alert you probably are and how important it is that you pull over. So far, so good — right?
Unfortunately, this thing costs $20 bucks. I’m very, very rarely one to complain about an app’s price — if anything, app devs have boned themselves by teaching folks that mobile apps should be dirt cheap. With that said, we live in a time in which the vast majority of folks on the road are completely convinced they’re the world’s finest driver. It’ll be tough enough to convince people that they need something like this to supplement their mortal shortcomings — at $20 bucks, it seems nigh impossible.