AutoMate: A physiological fatigue detection system for drowsy driving prevention

Sleeping behind the wheel is one of the leading causes of road accidents and there currently exists a lack of definite limits on fatigue. The United States of America’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration cites that over 100,000 road accidents in 2017 can be directly attributed to drowsy driving , and when over 1 in 2 Ontarian drivers admit to driving drowsy in the last month, it’s easy to see why this can be so dangerous. In fact, going 24 hours without sleep is equal to having a blood alcohol content of 0.10 %. That’s 0.02% above the legal driving limit. Despite knowing the dangerousness of being drowsy while driving, it is difficult to define and set limits on fatigue because of large inter- and intra-driver variability. While the current technologies to this problem are unfeasible and expensive because they are complex and are only available exclusively to high-end cars. The current systems also examine driving behaviour without focusing on the driver, lacking an adaptive user-level approach. Our system, AutoMate, is a portable, low-cost, low-power, fatigue detection system, based on driver physiological signals that detects driver drowsiness and provide haptic stimulation to invoke increased alertness.

Faculty Supervisor:

Sridhar Krishnan

Student:

Abdelrahman Abdou

Partner:

I-INC Foundation for Business Development

Discipline:

Engineering - biomedical

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

Ryerson University