Wearable Device-Based System to Monitor a Driver’s Stress, Fatigue, and Drowsiness

This paper proposes a wearable device-based system to monitor the abnormal conditions of a driver, including stress, fatigue, and drowsiness. The system measures the motional and physiological information of the driver using the developed wearable device on the wrist. Preprocessing is used to distinguish the valid signal parts of the measured signals, because various noises can occur in wearable sensors. Features are extracted from the signal parts, and an optimal feature set is determined by an analysis of variance and a sequential floating forward selection algorithm. To classify the driver's state, a support vector machine-based classification method is used to obtain high generalization performance considering interdriver variance. Experiments were conducted on an indoor driving simulator, with 28 subjects, to gather data for each state. The classification accuracy was 98.43% for fivefold cross validation on the data. In a subject-independent test, the accuracy was 68.31% for the four states and 84.46% for the three states consisting of normal, stressed, and fatigued or drowsy states. Using the proposed system, the abnormal conditions of the driver can be detected and distinguished. This advantage contributes to safer and more comfortable driving. Furthermore, the utilization of the wearable device makes the system easy to use.