As vehicles take on more responsibility- managing attention, assessing readiness, interpreting behaviour, and communicating intent- the cabin is becoming one of the most complex sensing environments in the modern technology landscape. The industry is moving beyond simple DMS and basic occupant detection toward a future in which vehicles must interpret human behaviour, emotional states, and context with nuance and reliability. And as Western markets accelerate L2+ and explore early L3 deployments, while China pushes ahead with aggressive in-cabin AI innovation, questions emerge around global competitiveness, regulation, trust, and system design.
InCabin USA 2026 brings together experts across driver monitoring, HMI/UX, safety engineering, AI, human factors, psychology, audio, seating systems, comfort, and data governance to explore how next-generation cabins will sense, interpret, and collaborate with the people inside them.
Here’s a deeper look at the themes shaping this year’s programme at InCabin USA:
DMS + Cognition – What Next?
Driver monitoring has moved beyond detecting distraction and drowsiness. The next frontier is cognition: understanding workload, intent, decision confidence, emotional state, stress levels, and the subtle human factors that determine whether a driver is capable of safely re-engaging during L2–L3 transitions.
This track examines the models, multi-sensor approaches, and behavioural science underpinning cognitive state assessment. Sessions will explore gaze dynamics, micro-expressions, physiological indicators, inferred intent, situational awareness evaluation, and how to measure “readiness” with defensible metrics. As the industry inches toward higher levels of automation, this deeper behavioural understanding is becoming foundational to safety cases and regulatory compliance.
The Intelligent Cockpit: Multi-Modal Sensing and Fusion
Modern cabins are evolving into multi-modal sensing hubs, combining visual, audio, tactile, environmental, and biometric inputs to create personalised, contextualised experiences. But the real challenge lies in fusion- how to unify these diverse signals into a coherent understanding of occupant state, needs, intent, and preferences.
This track explores multi-modal fusion frameworks, context-awareness, cross-sensor synchronisation, semantic interpretation, and adaptive UX that responds intelligently to human behaviour. As OEMs compete to differentiate on user experience, the cockpit becomes not just a control interface, but a collaborative environment where intuitive, personalised, and safety-enhancing interactions drive customer value.
Restraints, Airbags, CPD & Seat Technology for Safe and Adaptive Cabins
Safety and comfort converge as seating layouts, occupant behaviours, and cabin use cases diversify. This track examines advanced restraints, airbag systems, CPD strategies, and adaptive seating technologies designed to protect occupants across varied postures, body types, and cabin configurations- including reclined positions, rotated seating, shared mobility environments, and autonomous layouts.
Beyond crash scenarios, we explore how intelligent seating enhances comfort and wellbeing through posture detection, automated adjustment, fatigue mitigation, thermal comfort, and personalised ergonomics. With seating now spanning passive safety, active safety, and increasingly hybrid systems that blend sensing with real-time adjustment, this track looks at how the seat is becoming a cornerstone of both protection and human-centred experience in future vehicles.
Occupant Safety in Emerging Shared Mobility Models
Shared mobility introduces new complexities: unpredictable behaviours, non-standard postures, varied seating choices, and the absence of a supervising driver. Ride-hail, shuttles, robotaxis, and subscription fleets all present scenarios where occupants may misuse restraints, reposition seats, interact atypically with the cabin, or behave in ways that traditional safety models did not consider.
This track explores how safety systems adapt for these multi-occupant, driverless, and often unsupervised contexts. Discussions will address child and vulnerable passenger safety, misuse detection, seating variability, accessibility, risk identification, occupant-to-occupant interactions, and how to design protection systems for cabins that serve a constantly changing population. As autonomy expands, understanding how to protect unpredictable humans becomes as important as protecting predictable ones.
Privacy, Ethics & Data Governance for the Intelligent & Connected Cabin
In-cabin sensing is rapidly becoming richer and more inference-driven, drawing on facial, behavioural, emotional, physiological, and contextual data. This raises fundamental questions: What should vehicles measure? What is off-limits? Who owns the data? How should systems communicate their intent? And how do OEMs maintain trust in global markets with radically different regulatory frameworks?
This track will help delegates to better understand emerging privacy standards, ethical inference boundaries, transparency expectations, cybersecurity, and data governance frameworks for AI-enabled cabins. With biometrics, emotion inference, cognitive state modelling, and connected services entering mainstream designs, OEMs must strike a balance between innovation and responsible data practice. Trust is not a luxury- it’s a prerequisite for adoption.
Environmental and Emotional Edge Cases – Understanding Human Behaviour in Complex Environments
Human behaviour shifts dramatically in non-ideal conditions, and becomes significantly harder to interpret when environmental and emotional edge cases occur at the same time. A frightened expression obscured by glare, stress signals altered by heat, illness mistaken for distraction, or fatigue masked by facial occlusion all create challenges for in-cabin AI.
This track investigates how sensing systems recognise and reason about intertwined human and environmental factors to deliver reliable occupant understanding. Participants will discuss topics such as multimodal reasoning, robustness in adverse lighting, thermal variance, combined emotional and physiological stressors, and approaches to ensuring safety and wellbeing when humans behave unpredictably because the environment is pushing them into edge-case states.
InCabin USA 2026 is focused on understanding people-how they think, feel, behave, and interact with increasingly intelligent vehicles. These themes reflect a shift toward cabins that are not only safer, but more adaptive, personalised, and human-centred.
DID YOU KNOW?
Ticket holders for InCabin USA also get complimentary access to the AutoSens USA conference? AutoSens is the leading event for the ADAS and AD ecosystem, covering sensing and perception modalities, architectures, testing and validation, and many more besides.
