Can Steering Wheel Detect Your Driving Fatigue

Automated Driving System (ADS) has attracted increasing attention but the state-of-the-art ADS largely depend on vehicle driving parameters and facial features, which lacks reliability. Approaches using physiological based sensors (e.g., electroencephalogram or electrocardiogram) are either too clumsy to wear or impractical to install. In this paper, we propose a novel driver fatigue detection method by embedding surface electromyography (sEMG) sensors on a steering wheel. Compared with the existing methods, our approach is able to collect bio-signals in a non-intrusive way and detect driver fatigue at an earlier stage. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms existing methods with the weighted average F1 scores of about 90%. We also propose promising future directions to deploy this approach in real-life settings, such as applying multimodal learning using several supplementary sensors.