Effectiveness of Back and Foot Pressures for Assessing Drowsiness of Drivers

Abstract

A lot of studies on prediction or evaluation of drowsy driving are conducted using physiological measures in order to prevent traffic accidents due to drowsy driving. Although such physiological measures are to some extent useful for assessing drowsiness, there are some practical limitations such as necessity of attachment of measurement instruments to drivers. Therefore, in order to make drowsiness prediction system more practically usable, it is necessary to find behavioral measures which can be more easily measured than physiological measures. This study paid attention to the behavioral measures (the pressures on the backrest of the driving seat (back pressure) and the pressure on the soles of the foot (foot pressure)) while driving, and explored the effectiveness of these behavioral measures for predicting or evaluating drivers’ drowsiness. The behavioral measures (the back and the foot pressure) during the driving are promising and can be used effectively to evaluate and predict the drivers’ drowsiness.

Keywords: Prediction of Drowsiness, Behavioral Measure, Back Pressure, Foot Pressure

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe100154