Fatigue State Evaluation of Urban Railway Transit Drivers Using Psychological, Biological, and Physical Response Signals

Understanding the driver state (e.g., fatigue state) is critical in improving the safety of urban rail transit operations. This study reports a study that used the simulation experiment to evaluate the effects of fatigue on professional drivers’ psychological, biological, and physical responses and thus develop a fatigue detection model, enabling early warning and ensuring operational safety. Specifically, we applied statistical analytics on self-reported fatigue feelings, the Mackworth Clock Task, the Stroop Test, and the Iowa Gambling Task to evaluate the impact of fatigue on driver performance. The results show that fatigue reduced the participants’ reaction time and cognitive ability and led professional drivers to make more conservative decisions. Moreover, we utilized heart rate signals, electrodermal activity, and eye movements from wearable devices and cameras to build a driver fatigue detection model with machine-learning methods. We analyzed the impact of different time window lengths on fatigue detection. The results indicate that as the length of the time window increases, the data captures more comprehensive information, leading to improved fatigue detection accuracy. Furthermore, multi-feature fusion significantly enhanced model performance. With feature fusion, even short-term time windows can encapsulate sufficient information for effective fatigue detection. These findings not only contribute to a deeper understanding of the risks posed by fatigue in professional driving, but also pave the way to developing a real-time, non-invasive fatigue detection system, enhancing traffic safety.