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Validation of a new automatic drowsiness quantification system for drivers
Wertz, Jérôme; François, Clémentine; Verly, Jacques
20145th International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (AHFE)
 

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Keywords :
drowsiness; somnolence; sleepiness; fatigue; road safety; driving; eye; photooculography; oculography
Abstract :
[en] Drowsiness is a major cause of various types of accidents, and particularly of driving accidents. Scientific studies report that drowsiness would be responsible for 20 to 30% of driving accidents. Drowsiness can result from, among others, sleep deprivation, sleep disorders, alcohol, some medications, or performing a monotonous task. While all persons are likely to be drowsy at some point during the day, some persons are more prone than others to being drowsy at almost any time of the day; e.g. 6 to 11% of the population suffers from severe chronic excessive daytime sleepiness. Three main classes of methods can be used to characterize the level of drowsiness of a driver without disturbing him. These classes are respectively related to vehicle behavior (e.g. via lateral movements), driver behavior (e.g. via steering wheel movements), and driver physiological state (e.g. via eye movements). Since drowsiness is a physiological state, it seems particularly meaningful to use physiology-based methods to characterize it. Among these, the most significant ones rely on polysomnography and/or oculography. Polysomnography is viewed by some practitioners as the reference in the domain, but it is very sensitive to artifacts, and it is not very practical for use while driving. Ocular parameters are recognized to be good and reliable physiological indicators of drowsiness, and, thus, oculography seems to be the most sensible way to characterize drowsiness in practice. We have thus developed an experimental, fully automatic drowsiness monitoring system (software/algorithms) based on the physiological state of a person. This system uses ocular parameters extracted from images of the eye (i.e. photooculography) to determine a level of drowsiness on a continuous numerical scale from 0 to 10, with 0 corresponding to "very awake" (or "very vigilant") and 10 to "very drowsy". The ultimate goal of this system is to prevent drowsiness-related accidents for driving and other applications. The reported study shows that our system exhibits promising capability for road safety. Fourteen healthy volunteers (7 M, 7 F, mean age 23.7, range 21-33 years) participated in an experiment in a driving simulator, where they were asked to perform three driving sessions/runs (two of 45 minutes and one of 60 minutes) in different sleep-deprivation conditions (with up to 28 hours of complete sleep deprivation). During each session, we recorded both a high frame rate video of one eye and a set of driving parameters. Subsequently, for each successive minute in the session, we used our algorithms to extract ocular parameters from the video images and to produce a level of drowsiness, and we computed the standard deviation of lateral position (SDLP) from the driving parameters. The results show (1) that the (computed) SDLP increases when the (computed) level of drowsiness increases, and (2) that the level of drowsiness increases when the level of sleep deprivation increases. These results indicate that our algorithms for producing a level of drowsiness work in a meaningful way. The experiment protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee of our university.
Disciplines :
Engineering, computing & technology: Multidisciplinary, general & others
Neurosciences & behavior
Theoretical & cognitive psychology
Author, co-author :
Wertz, Jérôme ;  Université de Liège - ULiège > Dép. d'électric., électron. et informat. (Inst.Montefiore) > Exploitation des signaux et images
François, Clémentine ;  Université de Liège - ULiège > Dép. d'électric., électron. et informat. (Inst.Montefiore) > Exploitation des signaux et images
Verly, Jacques ;  Université de Liège - ULiège > Dép. d'électric., électron. et informat. (Inst.Montefiore) > Exploitation des signaux et images
Language :
English
Title :
Validation of a new automatic drowsiness quantification system for drivers
Publication date :
July 2014
Event name :
5th International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (AHFE)
Event place :
Krakow, Poland
Event date :
July 19-23, 2014
Audience :
International
Funders :
DGTRE - Région wallonne. Direction générale des Technologies, de la Recherche et de l'Énergie [BE]
Available on ORBi :
since 30 March 2014

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