Toward Health–Related Accident Prevention: Symptom Detection and Intervention Based on Driver Monitoring and Verbal Interaction

Professional drivers are required to safely transport passengers and/or properties of customers to their destinations, so they must keep being mentally and physically healthy. Health problems will largely affect driving performance and sometimes cause loss of consciousness, which results in injury, death, and heavy compensation. Conventional systems can detect the loss of consciousness or urgently stop the vehicle to prevent accidents, but detection of symptoms of diseases and providing support before the driver loses consciousness is more reasonable. It is challenging to earlier detect symptoms with high confidence. Toward solving these problems, we propose a new method with a multi-sensor based driver monitoring system to detect cues of symptoms quickly and a verbal interaction system to confirm the internal state of the driver based on the monitoring results to reduce false positives. There is almost no data that records abnormal conditions while driving and tests with unhealthy participants are dangerous and ethically unacceptable, so we developed a system with pseudo-symptom data and did outlier detection only with normal driving data. From data collection experiments, we defined the confidence level derived from cue signs. The results of evaluation experiments showed that the proposed system worked well in pseudo headache and drowsiness detection scenarios. We found that signs of drowsiness varied with individual drivers, so the multi-sensor based driver monitoring system was proved to be effective. Moreover, we found that there were individual differences in how the cue signs appeared, so we can propose an online re-training method to make the system adapt to individual drivers.