Abstract:

We examined if ECG-based features are discrimi-native towards drowsiness. Twenty-five volunteers (1932 years) completed 7×40 minutes of monotonous overnight driving simulation, designed to induce drowsiness. ECG (512 s-1) was recorded continuously; subjective ratings of drowsiness on the Karolinska sleepiness scale (KSS) were polled every five minutes. ECG recordings were divided into 5-min segments, each associated with the mean of one self- and two observer-KSS ratings. Those mean KSS values were binarized to obtain two classes not drowsy and drowsy. The Q-, R- and T-waves in the recordings were detected; R-peak positions were manually reviewed; the Q- and T-detection method was tested against the manual annotations of Physio-nets QT database. Power spectral densities of RR intervals (RR-PSD) and quantiles of the empirical distribution of heart-rate corrected QTc intervals were estimated. Support-vector machines and random-holdout cross-validation were used for the estimation of the classification error. Using either RR-PSD or QTc features yielded mean test errors of 79.3 ± 0.3 % and 82.7 ± 0.5 %, respectively. Merging RR and QTc features improved the accuracy to 88.3 ± 0.2 %. QTc intervals of the class drowsy were generally prolonged com-pared to not drowsy. Our findings indicate that the inclusion of QT intervals contribute to the discrimination of driver sleepiness.

Abstract:

Microsleep events (MSE) are short intrusions of sleep under the demand of sustained attention. They can impose a major threat to safety while driving a car and are considered one of the most significant causes of traffic accidents. Drivers fatigue and MSE account for up to 20% of all car crashes in Europe and at least 100,000 accidents in the US every year. Unfortunately, there is not a standardized test developed to quantify the degree of vigilance of a driver. To account for this problem, different approaches based on biosignal analysis have been studied in the past. In this paper, we investigate an electrocardiographic-based detection of MSE using morphological and rhythmical features. 14 records from a car driving simulation study with a high incidence of MSE were analyzed and the behavior of the ECG features before and after an MSE in relation to reference baseline values (without drowsiness) were investigated. The results show that MSE cannot be detected (or predicted) using only the ECG. However, in the presence of MSE, the rhythmical and morphological features were observed to be significantly different than the ones calculated for the reference signal without sleepiness. In particular, when MSE were present, the heart rate diminished while the heart rate variability increased. Time distances between P wave and R peak, and R peak and T wave and their dispersion increased also. This demonstrates a noticeable change of the autonomous regulation of the heart. In future, the ECG parameter could be used as a surrogate measure of fatigue.