Can Steering Wheel Detect Your Driving Fatigue?

TL;DR

This paper introduces a non-intrusive driver fatigue detection method using surface electromyography sensors embedded in the steering wheel, achieving high accuracy and offering practical advantages over existing approaches.

Contribution

It presents a novel, non-intrusive sEMG-based driver fatigue detection system embedded in the steering wheel, outperforming existing methods in accuracy.

Findings

Achieved about 90% weighted average F1 score.

Outperforms existing driver fatigue detection methods.

Proposes future multimodal sensor integration.

Abstract

Automated Driving System (ADS) has attracted increasing attention from both industrial and academic communities due to its potential for increasing the safety, mobility and efficiency of existing transportation systems. The state-of-the-art ADS follows the human-in-the-loop (HITL) design, where the driver's anomalous behaviour is closely monitored by the system. Though many approaches have been proposed for detecting driver fatigue, they largely depend on vehicle driving parameters and facial features, which lacks reliability. Approaches using physiological based sensors (e.g., electroencephalogram or electrocardiogram) are either too clumsy to wear or impractical to install. In this paper, we propose a novel driver fatigue detection method by embedding surface electromyography (sEMG) sensors on a steering wheel. Compared with the existing methods, our approach is able to collect bio-signals in a non-intrusive way and detect driver fatigue at an earlier stage. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms existing methods with the weighted average F1 scores about 90%. We also propose promising future directions to deploy this approach in real-life settings, such as applying multimodal learning using several supplementary sensors.