A novel haptic jacket based alerting scheme in a driver fatigue monitoring system

Sleep deprivation while driving is one of the major cause for roadway accidents. Eye closure and blink frequency are two of the primary evidences of driver fatigue. In this paper we propose a non-obtrusive driver alerting scheme, where we monitor the operator´s eye closure and blink parameters in real-time. Our developed system delivered an accuracy rate of 96% in eye states recognition that we leverage to deduce multi-level driver drowsiness states. Based on the level of fatigues we setup haptic altering scheme by using our previously developed haptic jacket. We consider an online progressive haptic alerting scheme (similar to silent mobile vibration alert) to warn the drowsy operator in order to prevent major road accidents. We propose a preliminary prototype of the system and evaluate its suitability in a controlled in lab usability study.