Drowsiness as one of the impaired driving behaviour is an important area of concern in ground transportation safety. It can coincide with skill‐demanding situations that may lead to vehicle control loss and possibly traffic accidents. Although drowsiness effects on driving performances have been widely investigated, there are few studies that propose a description of its effect on human neuromuscular state. To address this issue, this study aims to investigate the effects of drowsiness on driver neuromuscular state via the estimation of mechanical arm admittance. Mechanical arm admittance is a car dedicated parameter that gives information about arm stiffness of driver and its corresponding response in the frequency domain. Ten participants performed an experiment on a driving simulator, where they experienced steering disturbances, which aims to estimate variations of mechanical arm admittance as well as variations of driving performances between alert and drowsy states. Moreover, variation in driving performances were assessed by the variation of steering reversal rate and standard deviation of lane position. Results indicate that drowsiness increases the gain of mechanical arm admittance for arm movements <2.5 Hz and also deteriorates car steering control, increasing the steering operations amplitude and leading to larger vehicle lateral deviations.
Effect of drowsiness on mechanical arm admittance and driving performances
IET Intelligent Transport Systems ; 12 , 3 ; 220-226
2018-04-01
7 pages
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
car dedicated parameter , driving performances , vehicle lateral deviations , road safety , steering reversal rate , behavioural sciences computing , arm stiffness , steering disturbances , driving simulator , mechanical arm admittance , drowsiness , driver neuromuscular state , car steering control , ground transportation safety , intelligent transportation systems , impaired driving behaviour , frequency domain