Prediction of drowsy driving by monitoring driver's behavior

In this paper, we present a system that monitors the increasing frequency of driver's subsidiary behavior as a revealing indicator of driver's decrease in arousal level that would cause drowsy driving. The considered involuntary subsidiary behavior events are yawning, self-touching hand motion and head twisting movement, which increased as a signal of struggle against sleepiness in a driving simulator experiment. We show that by combining this index with conventional indexes of eye closure rate and head sway, we obtained better results than conventional drowsiness detection systems. The results obtained in proving ground driving conditions were satisfactory and the timing of the generated feedback was acceptable to most of the volunteers who tested our prototype.