Computational intelligent brain computer interaction and its applications on driving cognition

Driving is one of the most common attention-demanding tasks in daily life. Driver's fatigue, drowsiness, inattention, and distraction are reported a major causal factor in many traffic accidents. Due to the drivers lost their attention, they had markedly reduced the perception, recognition and vehicle control abilities. In recent years, many computational intelligent technologies were developed for preventing traffic accidents caused by driver's inattention. Driver's drowsiness and distraction related studies had become a major interest research topic in automotive safety engineering. Many researches had investigated the driving cognition in cognitive neuro-engineering, but how to utilize the main findings of driving-related cognitive researches in traditional cognitive neuroscience and integrate with computational intelligence technologies for augmenting driving performance will become a big challenge in the interdisciplinary research area. For this reason, we attempt to integrate the driving cognition for real life application in this study. The implications of the driving cognition in cognitive neuroscience and computational intelligence for daily applications are also demonstrated through two common attention-related driving studies: (1) cognitive-state monitoring of the driver performing the realistic long-term driving tasks in a simulated realistic-driving environment; and (2) to extract the brain dynamic changes of driver's distraction effect during dual-task driving. Experimental results of these studies provide new insights into the understanding of complex brain functions of participants actively performing ordinary tasks in natural body positions and situations within real operational environments.