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Sensor signal fusion is becoming increasingly important in many areas including medical diagnosis and classification. Today, clinicians/experts often do the diagnosis of stress, sleepiness and tiredness on the basis of information collected from several physiological sensor signals. Since there are large individual variations when analyzing the sensor measurements and systems with single sensor, they could easily be vulnerable to uncertain noises/interferences in such domain; multiple sensors could provide more robust and reliable decision. Therefore, this paper presents a classification approach i.e. Multivariate Multiscale Entropy Analysis–Case-Based Reasoning (MMSE–CBR) that classifies physiological parameters of wheel loader operators by combining CBR approach with a data level fusion method named Multivariate Multiscale Entropy (MMSE). The MMSE algorithm supports complexity analysis of multivariate biological recordings by aggregating several sensor measurements e.g., Inter-beat-Interval (IBI) and Heart Rate (HR) from Electrocardiogram (ECG), Finger Temperature (FT), Skin Conductance (SC) and Respiration Rate (RR). Here, MMSE has been applied to extract features to formulate a case by fusing a number of physiological signals and the CBR approach is applied to classify the cases by retrieving most similar cases from the case library. Finally, the proposed approach i.e. MMSE–CBR has been evaluated with the data from professional drivers at Volvo Construction Equipment, Sweden. The results demonstrate that the proposed system that fuses information at data level could classify ‘stressed’ and ‘healthy’ subjects 83.33% correctly compare to an expert’s classification. Furthermore, with another data set the achieved accuracy (83.3%) indicates that it could also classify two different conditions ‘adapt’ (training) and ‘sharp’ (real-life driving) for the wheel loader operators. Thus, the new approach of MMSE–CBR could support in classification of operators and may be of interest to researchers developing systems based on information collected from different sensor sources.

Brain waves obtained by Electroencephalograms (EEG) recording are an important research area in medical and health and brain computer interface (BCI). Due to the nature of EEG signal, noises and artifacts can contaminate it, which leads to a serious misinterpretation in EEG signal analysis. These contaminations are referred to as artifacts, which are signals of other than brain activity. Moreover, artifacts can cause significant miscalculation of the EEG measurements that reduces the clinical usefulness of EEG signals. Therefore, artifact handling is one of the cornerstones in EEG signal analysis. This paper provides a review of machine learning algorithms that have been applied in EEG artifacts handling such as artifacts identification and removal. In addition, an analysis of these methods has been reported based on their performance.

A growing traffic safety issue is the effect of cognitive loading activities on traffic safety and driving performance. To monitor drivers' mental state, understanding cognitive load is important since while driving, performing cognitively loading secondary tasks, for example talking on the phone, can affect the performance in the primary task, i.e. driving. Electroencephalography (EEG) is one of the reliable measures of cognitive load that can detect the changes in instantaneous load and effect of cognitively loading secondary task. In this driving simulator study, 1-back task is carried out while the driver performs three different simulated driving scenarios. This paper presents an EEG based approach to classify a drivers' level of cognitive load using Case-Based Reasoning (CBR). The results show that for each individual scenario as well as using data combined from the different scenarios, CBR based system achieved approximately over 70% of classification accuracy. 

Automated analyses of electroencephalographic (EEG) signals acquired in naturalistic environments is becoming increasingly important in areas such as brain computer interfaces and behaviour science. However, the recorded EEG in such environments is often heavily contaminated by motion artifacts and eye movements. This poses new requirements on artifact handling. The objective of this paper is to present an automated EEG artifacts handling algorithm which will be used as a pre-processing step in a driver monitoring application. The algorithm, named ARTE (Automated aRTifacts handling in EEG), is based on wavelets, independent component analysis and hierarchical clustering. The algorithm is tested on a dataset obtained from a driver sleepiness study including 30 drivers and 540 30-minute 30-channel EEG recordings. The algorithm is evaluated by a clinical neurophysiologist, by quantitative criteria (signal quality index, mean square error, relative error and mean absolute error), and by demonstrating its usefulness as a preprocessing step in driver monitoring, here exemplified with driver sleepiness classification. All results are compared with a state of the art algorithm called FORCe. The quantitative and expert evaluation results show that the two algorithms are comparable and that both algorithms significantly reduce the impact of artifacts in recorded EEG signals. When artifact handling is used as a pre-processing step in driver sleepiness classification, the classification accuracy increased by 5% when using ARTE and by 2% when using FORCe. The advantage with ARTE is that it is data driven and does not rely on additional reference signals or manually defined thresholds, making it well suited for use in dynamic settings where unforeseen and rare artifacts are commonly encountered.

The many vehicle crashes that are caused by driver sleepiness each year advocates the development of automated driver sleepiness detection (ADSD) systems. This study proposes an automatic sleepiness classification scheme designed using data from 30 drivers who repeatedly drove in a high-fidelity driving simulator, both in alert and in sleep deprived conditions. Driver sleepiness classification was performed using four separate classifiers: k-nearest neighbours, support vector machines, case-based reasoning, and random forest, where physiological signals and contextual information were used as sleepiness indicators. The subjective Karolinska sleepiness scale (KSS) was used as target value. An extensive evaluation on multiclass and binary classifications was carried out using 10-fold cross-validation and leave-one-out validation. With 10-fold cross-validation, the support vector machine showed better performance than the other classifiers (79% accuracy for multiclass and 93% accuracy for binary classification). The effect of individual differences was also investigated, showing a 10% increase in accuracy when data from the individual being evaluated was included in the training dataset. Overall, the support vector machine was found to be the most stable classifier. The effect of adding contextual information to the physiological features improved the classification accuracy by 4% in multiclass classification and by and 5% in binary classification.