Sticking with the example of the woman putting on makeup, the current nissan driver assist mode would do what you propose. It alarms, buzzes the wheel, etc when a hand isn’t detected on the wheel. Progress
A person can have two hands on the wheel and eyes forward and still not be alert and paying attention.
Anyway, I've been driving my whole life with distracted drivers all around me. I hate it, but the sorts of things distracted drivers do can be accounted for by:
- Being hyper-alert at intersections for drivers not slowing for red lights or stop signs.
- Constant alertness on the highway for drivers not holding steady in their lane.
- Slowing in approach to vision-compromised corners and hills.
- Maintaining large gaps to cars in front.
Because human drivers tend to fail both slowly and observably. Which I can explain if you need me to, but I think you'll understand if you think about it for a moment.
Whereas software operates far, far more quickly and has a far far quicker implementation time once it's reached a, potentially highly flawed, "decision". This creates faults that are difficult to spot in time for the rest of us to recognize and react.
We all agree that eventually, software and sensors, operating in a network of vehicles and infrastructure together, will produce far safer modes of transport. But we're not there yet. We're not even particularly close yet. Mostly because of the missing infrastructure and V2V networking standards and so forth.