Detecting Driver Drowsiness Using Wireless Wearables

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data show that drowsy driving causes more than 100,000 crashes a year. In order to prevent these devastating accidents, it is necessary to build a reliable driver drowsiness detection system which could alert the driver before a mishap happens. In the literature, the drowsiness of a driver can be measured by vehicle-based, behavior-based, and physiology-based approaches. Comparing with the vehicle-based and behavior-based measurements, the physiological measurement of drowsiness is more accurate. With the latest release of wireless wearable devices such as biosensors that can measure people's physiological data, we aim to explore the possibility of designing a user-friendly and accurate driver drowsiness detection system using wireless wearables. In this paper, we use a wearable biosensor called Bio Harness 3 produced by Zephyr Technology to measure a driver's physiological data. We present our overall design idea of the driver drowsiness detection system and the preliminary experimental results using the biosensor. The detection system will be designed in two phases: The main task of the first phase is to collect a driver's physiological data by the biosensor and analyze the measured data to find the key parameters related to the drowsiness. In the second phase, we will design a drowsiness detection algorithm and develop a mobile app to alert drowsy drivers. The results from this project can lead to the development of real products which can save many lives and avoid many accidents on the road. Furthermore, our results can be widely applied to any situation where people should not fall asleep: from the applications in mission-critical fields to the applications in everyday life.