RESEARCH ON VEHICLE-BASED DRIVER STATUS/PERFORMANCE MONITORING, PART I

A driver drowsiness detection/alarm/countermeasures system was specified, tested and evaluated, resulting in the development of revised algorithms for the detection of driver drowsiness. Previous algorithms were examined in a test and evaluation study, and were found to be ineffective in detecting drowsiness. These previous algorithms had been developed and validated under simulator conditions that did not emphasize the demand for maintaining the vehicle in the lane as would be expected in normal driving. Revised algorithms were then developed under conditions that encouraged more natural lane-keeping behavior by drivers in the simulator. In these revised algorithms, correlations between dependent drowsiness measures and independent performance-related measures were lower than expected. However, classification accuracy improved when a criterion of "drowsiness or performance" was used, with performance assessed directly from a lane-related measure.