Towards the detection of microsleep events in a driving simulator

In the paper the authors describe their experimental setup that they use for the analysis of driver fatigue and microsleep events. The driving simulator is based on an SGI Visual Workstation and equipped with a car seat, a force feedback steering wheel, pedals and a large back projection screen for a realistic driving simulation. The back projection screen offers a field of view of up to 60 deg. The authors collect two different kinds of data based on multichannel EEG and the tracking of gaze and eye lids (blink). Gaze and blink data are obtained from a commercial video-based system (InSight, SensoMotoric Instruments, Berlin, Germany). They then perform a multivariate data analysis of the two synchronized data streams. The data are collected during overnight driving sessions of volunteers in the lab. To obtain a sufficient number of microsleep events, each subject has to drive on a simulated straight highway for three hours. The multivariate data analysis is then performed in two steps: (i) feature extraction and (ii) classification. Preliminary results will be presented at the conference.