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Driving a vehicle involves a series of events, which are related to and evolve with the mental state (such as sleepiness, mental load, and stress) of the driv- er. These states are also identified as causal factors of critical situations that can lead to road accidents and vehicle crashes. These driver impairments need to be detected and predicted in order to reduce critical situations and road accidents. In the past years, physiological signals have become conven- tional measures in driver impairment research. Physiological signals have been applied in various studies to identify different levels of mental load, sleepiness, and stress during driving.

This licentiate thesis work has investigated several artificial intelligence algorithms for developing an intelligent system to monitor driver mental state using physiological signals. The research aims to measure sleepiness and mental load using Electroencephalography (EEG). EEG signals, if pro- cessed correctly and efficiently, have potential to facilitate advanced moni- toring of sleepiness, mental load, fatigue, stress etc. However, EEG signals can be contaminated with unwanted signals, i.e., artifacts. These artifacts can lead to serious misinterpretation. Therefore, this work investigates EEG arti- fact handling methods and propose an automated approach for EEG artifact handling. Furthermore, this research has also investigated how several other physiological parameters (Heart Rate (HR) and Heart Rate Variability (HRV) from the Electrocardiogram (ECG), Respiration Rate, Finger Tem- perature (FT), and Skin Conductance (SC)) to quantify drivers’ stress. Dif- ferent signal processing methods have been investigated to extract features from these physiological signals. These features have been extracted in the time domain, in the frequency domain as well as in the joint time-frequency domain using wavelet analysis. Furthermore, data level signal fusion has been proposed using Multivariate Multiscale Entropy (MMSE) analysis by combining five physiological sensor signals. Primarily Case-Based Reason- ing (CBR) has been applied for drivers’ mental state classification, but other Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques such as Fuzzy Logic, Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) have been investigat- ed as well.

For drivers’ stress classification, using the CBR and MMSE approach, the system has achieved 83.33% classification accuracy compared to a human expert. Moreover, three classification algorithms i.e., CBR, an ANN, and a SVM were compared to classify drivers’ stress. The results show that CBR has achieved 80% and 86% accuracy to classify stress using finger tempera- ture and heart rate variability respectively, while ANN and SVM reached an accuracy of less than 80%. 

Driving a vehicle in a dynamic traffic environment requires continuous adaptation of a complex manifold of physiological and cognitive activities. Impaired driving due to, for example, sleepiness, inattention, cognitive load or stress, affects one’s ability to adapt, predict and react to upcoming traffic events. In fact, human error has been found to be a contributing factor in more than 90% of traffic crashes. Unfortunately, there is no robust, objective ground truth for determining a driver’s state, and researchers often revert to using subjective self-rating scales when assessing level of sleepiness, cognitive load or stress. Thus, the development of better tools to understand, measure and monitor human behaviour across diverse scenarios and states is crucial. The main objective of this thesis is to develop objective measures of sleepiness, cognitive load and stress, which can later be used as research tools, either to benchmark unobtrusive sensor solutions or when investigating the influence of other factors on sleepiness, cognitive load, and stress.

This thesis employs multivariate data analysis using machine learning to detect and classify different driver states based on physiological data. The reason for using rather intrusive sensor data, such as electroencephalography (EEG), electrooculography (EOG), electrocardiography (ECG), skin conductance, finger temperature, and respiration is that these methods can be used to analyse how the brain and body respond to internal and external changes, including those that do not generate overt behaviour. Moreover, the use of physiological data is expected to grow in importance when investigating human behaviour in partially automated vehicles, where active driving is replaced by passive supervision.

Physiological data, especially the EEG is sensitive to motion artifacts and noise, and when recorded in naturalistic environments such as driving, artifacts are unavoidable. An automatic EEG artifact handling method ARTE (Automated aRTifacts handling in EEG) was therefore developed. When used as a pre-processing step in the classification of driver sleepiness, ARTE increased classification performance by 5%. ARTE 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. In addition, several machine-learning algorithms have been developed for sleepiness, cognitive load, and stress classification. Regarding sleepiness classification, the best achieved accuracy was achieved using a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. For multiclass, the obtained accuracy was 79% and for binary class it was 93%. A subject-dependent classification exhibited a 10% improvement in performance compared to the subject-independent classification, suggesting that much can be gained by using personalized classifiers. Moreover, by embedding contextual information, classification performance improves by approximately 5%. In regard to cognitive load classification, a 72% accuracy rate was achieved using a random forest classifier. Combining features from several data sources may improve performance, and indeed, we observed classification performance improvement by 10%-20% compared to using features from a single data source. To classify drivers’ stress, using the Case-based reasoning (CBR) and data fusion approach, the system achieved an 83.33% classification accuracy rate.

This thesis work encourages the use of multivariate data for detecting and classifying driver states, including sleepiness, cognitive load, and stress. A univariate data source often presents challenges, since features from a single source or one just aspect of the feature are not entirely reliable; Therefore, multivariate information requires accurate driver state detection. Often, driver states are a subjective experience, in which other contextual data plays a vital role. Thus, the implication of incorporating contextual information in the classification scheme is presented in this thesis work. Although there are several commonalities, physiological signals are modulated differently in different driver states; Hence, multivariate data could help detect multiple driver states simultaneously – for example, cognitive load detection when a person is under the influence of different levels of stress.