Authors:Mouli Ramasamy, Sechang Oh, Robert Harbaugh and Vijay K. Varadan
Source: FERMAT, Volume 1, Article 4, Jan.-Feb., 2014
Abstract: —Drowsiness and its effect on driver impairment is one of the major factors of accidents or vehicle crashes. A myriad of systems in the engineering discipline have been developed to monitor drowsiness and fatigue in a driver. However, statistics from the NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration), FMCSA (Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration) and CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) exemplify a need to develop technoefficient systems to monitor drowsiness in a driver. Pursued researches and commercially available systems supplicate the demands of this field. Varied approaches like bio potential signal methods, image recognition techniques, behavior detection strategies, driving habit approaches are a few methods used to detect drowsiness. Conventionally, the bio-potential-signal approaches have provided better technological breakthroughs in terms of efficiency and have alleviated ill-effects. Consequently, this paper proposes a system based on the electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrooculogram (EOG) type of information to discriminate drowsiness and attentiveness. To monitor the EEG and EOG, development of a flexible headband equipped with a textile-based analog sensor and a signal processing unit is proposed. The sensor acts an electrode to acquire bio potentials from the frontal cortex of the forehead, and is electrically transmitted to the processing unit through conductive threads, where the signal is processed and transmitted through a Bluetooth communication module. The transmitted signal is received in a monitoring unit, where the signals are further processed and classified to detect drowsiness. This paper focuses on monitoring drowsiness in a driver, since the statistics reveal that people are affected the most because of drowsiness during driving than performing other tasks.
Index Terms: Drowsiness, EEG, EOG, Real time monitoring, Bluetooth and Textile electrode.
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Real Time Monitoring of Driver Drowsiness and Alertness by Textile Based Nanosensors and Wireless Communication Platform