The Impact of Surrounding Road Objects and Conditions on Drivers Abrupt Heart Rate Changes

TL;DR

This study investigates how surrounding road objects and conditions influence abrupt increases in drivers' heart rates, highlighting the potential for real-time stress detection and mitigation in naturalistic driving environments.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel analysis of visual scenes and driver facial engagement related to sudden heart rate increases using a naturalistic driving dataset.

Findings

Presence of stress-inducing objects increases near abrupt HR changes

Drivers' facial engagement varies significantly around HR spikes

Closer proximity to certain objects correlates with HR increases

Abstract

Recent studies have pointed out the importance of mitigating drivers stress and negative emotions. These studies show that certain road objects such as big vehicles might be associated with higher stress levels based on drivers subjective stress measures. Additionally, research shows strong correlations between drivers stress levels and increased heart rate (HR). In this paper, based on a naturalistic multimodal driving dataset, we analyze the visual scenes of driving in the vicinity of abrupt increases in drivers HR for the presence of certain stress-inducing road objects. We show that the probability of the presence of such objects increases when becoming closer to the abrupt increase in drivers HR. Additionally, we show that drivers facial engagement changes significantly in the vicinity of abrupt increases in HR. Our results lay the ground for a human-centered driving experience by detecting and mitigating drivers stress levels in the wild.