In-car tracking of vital signs:
BMW Group takes medicine to the road.

When your car monitors your heart rate: The BMW Group and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin are exploring how connected sensors can measure a driver’s vital signs for early detection of risks such as heart attacks or strokes. It’s an exciting glimpse into the world of automotive health – and a collaboration that combines mobility and medicine like never before.

A BMW 750e xDrive plug-in hybrid glides quietly through the city, its sensors monitoring the driver’s heart rate, breathing frequency and other vital signs. For now, this is still part of a study, but the vision of a future that merges medicine and mobility is becoming increasingly clear.

This is about rethinking preventive medicine, adapting health technologies for everyday use and transforming cars into active health companions. It’s the focus of a unique research partnership between the BMW Group and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, underway since late 2024.

“The BMW Group and Charité share a common goal: advancing research at the highest level,” says Dr Jörg Preißinger, Team Lead UX Technologies at the BMW Group. “In Automotive Health, we are leveraging our combined expertise to achieve key breakthroughs in predictive medicine and early warning systems. Our goal is clear: we want to detect health risks and changes in the driver as quickly as possible – to enable proactive measures that prevent any further deterioration and ensure rapid responses in emergencies. BMW vehicles already provide a strong technical foundation for this, with precise sensors, intelligent actuators, and high-performance computing architectures that can process complex data in real time.”

The foundation of this collaboration is a joint letter of intent. Since spring 2025 the partnership has taken shape with the launch of a large-scale study exploring how cutting-edge vehicle sensors powered by artificial intelligence (AI) can assess and evaluate a driver’s health status – creating a direct link between medicine and mobility.

The study uses a BMW 750e xDrive plug-in hybrid in Carbon Black Metallic – its special Automotive Health foiling signalling clearly to the outside world that it is a high-tech, high-precision research vehicle equipped with cutting-edge sensors. Fittings include a steering wheel with an integrated ECG device, a microphone in the safety belt to capture heart sounds, and a camera for recording vital signs.

The BMW 7 Series measures a range of parameters including skin conductance and heart and breathing frequency. The sensors enable medically relevant data to be recorded under real driving conditions – in a standardised, continuous and reproducible way, and in part without physical contact.

The study involves 120 participants aged 50 and above, comprising both healthy individuals and those with an increased cardiovascular risk. Measurements are taken in real traffic, while stationary, and on the test track – automatically and without the drivers needing to take any active steps to contribute. This approach allows everyday situations to be analysed without influencing participants’ behaviour.

“We want to find out which technologies are most reliable for detecting health anomalies within the car,” says Alexander Meyer, Professor of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Director of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine at Charité – Universitätsmedizin. “That’s why we are verifying the validity and quality of the vital parameters we record in different driving situations,” adds Dr Matthias Franz, BMW Research New Technologies and Automotive Health Project Lead.

The research findings are expected to pave the way for intelligent early warning systems – through technologies that can detect health changes early and respond in time. The longer-term aim is to develop a chain of responses that not only automatically brakes the car in the event of an acute emergency, such as a sudden heart attack or signs of stroke, but also alerts the emergency services and shares relevant health data directly.

“Continuous, multimodal health data tracking offers a completely new foundation for developing personalised preventive health programmes,” explains Professor Meyer. The BMW Group brings to the project its extensive expertise in sensors, vehicle technologies and data processing: “Our goal is to enhance driving comfort and safety by adapting the vehicle setup to the driver’s current performance state,” adds Dr Franz. 

“Vehicles of the future will be about more than just transport,” says Dr Franz. “They will be smart systems that detect health risks early, take preventive action and provide professional support in emergencies.”

Professor Meyer also sees the collaboration as a model for the future: “Healthcare needs to happen where people live, work – and drive. This partnership with the BMW Group demonstrates how technological innovation and clinical research can work hand in hand to deliver new solutions to the challenges of demographic change.”

The first findings of the study are expected in 2026. In the longer term, the two partners intend to translate their insights into standard vehicle features and health-support programmes. This next step will be further evidence of how the BMW Group leverages state-of-the-art technologies not only for driving dynamics but also for wellbeing.