Influence of Time Pressure on Driver’s Response Time under Stressed Conditions

Abstract: The present study attempts to understand the driver’s mental state during driving due to the imposed time pressure and prevailing traffic condition based on heart-related physiological features. A Gaussian mix model-based clustering approach was adopted in this work to classify the developed stress on three distinct levels: low, medium, and high. Further, this study applied a defuzzification methodology to transform the fuzzy representation of probability values for each sample in a crisp dataset to develop a stress index. The developed stress index is crucial for alerting the driver regarding their mental state for avoiding any risky driving behavior under stressed conditions. Finally, the current work proposed a sliding window methodology for determining the response time of the driver to any significant stress level change and investigated the characteristic of the calculated driver-specific response time which will be sensitive to driving duration based on stress level and time pressure condition.

Keywords: Stress, Time pressure, Clustering, Defuzzification, Response time

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1003071

Cite this paper:

​