Prediction of driver fatigue: Approaches and open challenges

Fatigue is a mental process that grows gradually and affects human reaction time and the consciousness. It is one of the causes of road fatal accidents around the globe. Although it is now generally accepted that fatigue plays an important role in road safety, it is still largely left to individual drivers to manage. The recent research in this area focuses on fatigue detection and the existing systems alert the drivers in severe fatigued stage. These systems use either physiological signs of the fatigue or the behavioural reaction to generate alerts. This research investigates the feasibility of using a group of fatigue symptoms (such as pupil response, gaze patterns, steering reaction and EEG) to build a robust fatigue detection algorithm that can be used in a real-life system for the early prediction and avoidance of fatigue development. Intensive testing and validation stages are required to ensure the reliability and the suitability of the system that should be able to detect fatigue levels at different degrees of tiredness. Moreover, the proposed system predicts subsequent stages of fatigue and generates an approximate behavioural model for each individual driver to enable more personalised and effective intervention.