The Psychophysiological Prediction of Driving Quality Under Fatigue

Driver fatigue is a significant cause of road fatalities all over the world. Preventive measures do not seem to alleviate this situation thus far. With the aim of advancing the field towards possible solutions to this problem, this work examines the value of psychophysiological variables to predict the quality of driving performance under fatigue. This study was conducted with sleep deprived subjects performing a simulated driving task. Driving performance was analyzed in epochs and classified to represent accurate, unstable or deficient states of driving. EEG band powers, eye blink activity and heart rate preceding the states of driving were examined through logistic regression analyses. The results indicate that the psychophysiological variables changed to a great extent in the direction of our hypotheses from accurate to unstable or deficient driving. We encourage other researchers to target psychophysiological variables as predictors of driver fatigue. This book is well suited to students initiating their experimental assignments in Psychology. Human factors researchers and practitioners can benefit from this reading as well.