The relationship between HRV parameters and stressful driving situation in the real road

The aim of this paper is to find a relation between HRV parameters of ECG and stressful driving situation in the real road through various tests. First, we gave a stress to the subject by increasing the driving speed using driving simulator in the laboratory. Second, the subject drove the vehicle on the real road. Through let him drove in the busy narrow street, we evoked stress. ECG and PPG signal was recorded from steering wheel and back cushion each unconsciously. The driving experiment with simulator was not suitable to reproduce actual traffic condition because the adaptation was occurred. On the other hand, in real driving test, the results show that the heart rate is increase, and SDNN, RMSSD, pNN50 were decreased. The heart rate is the strongest indicator and other parameters tend to be changed depend on a personal. The blood pressure had no significant changes. Our results show the good possibility of that the time parameters of the HRV could be used as an instantaneous stress indicator.