The focus of this paper is on vehicle-based operator alertness/drowsiness/vigilance monitoring devices as alertness monitoring technologies. These technologies monitor – usually on-line and in real time – biobehavioral aspects of the operator; for example, eye gaze, eye closure, pupil occlusion, head position and movement, brain wave activity, and heart rate. To be practical and useful as driver warning systems, these devices must acquire, interpret, and feed back information to the operator in real world driving environments. As such, there exists a need and, thus, ongoing efforts are underway, to validate operator-based, on-board fatigue monitoring technologies in a real-world naturalistic driving environment. The objective of this paper is to review and discuss some of the activities currently underway to develop unobtrusive, in-vehicle, real-time drowsy driver detection and fatigue monitoring/alerting systems and to present a format by which these technologies may be evaluated for use in transportation operations. The paper is therefore divided into three sections. The following section outlines the general scientific design guidelines for a practical, in-vehicle fatigue detection and monitoring system. Next, a proposed methodology that includes a number of criteria for evaluating user acceptance of such technologies is presented, and relevant implementation and design issues are highlighted. In the final section, an overview of several promising technologies that are currently in use or that will be available in the near future is provided, including technical features and a brief summary of the development status for each. As a means of comparing these technologies in light of the various scientific guidelines and user acceptance criteria that are discussed, the paper concludes with a tabular conceptualization of how one might approach such a task. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting