Mehrnaz Moattari - Department of Animal Biology, Kharazmi University, Tehran, Iran

Behavioral interaction and medical treatment are usually considered for risky driving patterns or medical issues. For a broader group of drivers, driver alert devices are a popular option. A driver alert device does not prevent a driver from being drowsy. Instead, it allows the driver to be aware of his/her condition and take the necessary precautions. Various devices have been developed to detect driver drowsiness. Some identify abnormal driving patterns by checking steering input from electric power steering system of vehicle. In this work, an easy-to-use and cost-efficient driver alert system is proposed. The EEG headset can acquire a brain signal at a sampling rate of 512Hz. A smartphone software application (APP) based upon the Android operation system was developed to implement data communication and signal processing. EEG data received by the smartphone are transformed into the frequency domain. Band power values in the alpha and beta bands are computed as features. A nonlinear Support Vector Machine (SVM) is trained to detect drowsiness using the band power features. An experimental study was performed to evaluate the system. It was observed that the accuracy varies across subjects and test sessions. This is not surprising because EEG exhibits significant within- and between-subject variations, and generally between-subject variation is greater than within-subject variation. This is the major reason that such a system is trained and used for an individual user. Typical reasons causing drowsy driving include sleep issues, risky driving patterns, and the use of sedating medications or alcohol, and interactions among these factors. Electroencephalography (EEG) has been widely used to identify changes of brain activity associated with drowsiness because signal variations in some EEG frequency bands are associated with an increased or decreased brain concentration. The preparation of such an EEG system takes few minutes, which is convenient for testing daily driving activities.

EEG, Sleep drowsiness