Drowsiness has a globally negative impact on performance, slowing reaction time, decreasing situational awareness, and impairing judgment. A field operational test of an early prototype Drowsy Driver Warning System was conducted as a result of 12 years of field and laboratory studies by the National Highway Traffic Administration and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. This project included Control and Test groups. The final data set for the analysis consisted of 102 drivers from 3 for-hire trucking fleets using 46 instrumented trucks. Fifty-seven drivers were line-haul and 45 were long-haul operators. The data set contained nearly 12.4 terabytes of truck instrumentation data, kinematic data, and video recordings for 2.4 million miles of driving and 48,000 driving-data hours recorded, resulting in the largest data set ever collected by the U.S. Department of Transportation. In this study, 53 research questions were addressed related to safety benefits, acceptance, and deployment. Novel data reduction procedures and data analyses were used. Results showed that drivers in the Test Group were less drowsy. Drivers with favoring opinions of the system tended to have an increase in safety benefits. Results of the assessment revealed that the early prototype device had an overall positive impact on driver safety. (Author/publisher)
Abstract