Wireless-based portable EEG-EOG monitoring for real time drowsiness detection

Drowsiness is one of the major risk factors causing accidents that result in a large number of damage. Drivers and industrial workers probably have a large effect on several mishaps occurring from drowsiness. Therefore, advanced technology to reduce these accidental rates is a very challenging problem. Nowadays, there have been many drowsiness detectors using electroencephalogram (EEG), however, the cost is still high and the use of this is uncomfortable in long-term monitoring because most of them require wiring and conventional wet electrodes. The purpose of this paper is to develop a portable wireless device that can automatically detect the drowsiness in real time by using the EEG and electrooculogram (EOG). The silver (Ag) conducting fabric consolidated in a headband used as dry electrodes can acquire signal from the user´s forehead. The signal was sent via the wireless communication of XBee® 802.15.4 to a standalone microcontroller to analyze drowsiness using the proposed algorithm. The alarm will ring when the drowsiness occurs. Besides, the automatic drowsiness detection and alarm device yields the real-time detection accuracy of approximately 81%.