Detection of driver fatigue caused by sleep deprivation

This paper aims to provide reliable indications of driver drowsiness based on the characteristics of driver-vehicle interaction. A test bed was built under a simulated driving environment, and a total of 12 subjects participated in two experiment sessions requiring different levels of sleep (partial sleep-deprivation versus no sleep-deprivation) before the experiment. The performance of the subjects was analyzed in a series of stimulus-response and routine driving tasks, which revealed the performance differences of drivers under different sleep-deprivation levels. The experiments further demonstrated that sleep deprivation had greater effect on rule-based than on skill-based cognitive functions: when drivers were sleep-deprived, their performance of responding to unexpected disturbances degraded, while they were robust enough to continue the routine driving tasks such as lane tracking, vehicle following, and lane changing. In addition, we presented both qualitative and quantitative guidelines for designing drowsy-driver detection systems in a probabilistic framework based on the paradigm of Bayesian networks. Temporal aspects of drowsiness and individual differences of subjects were addressed in the framework. © 2009 IEEE.