International Journal of Neural Systems, Vol. 24, No.

3 (2014) 1450006 (15 pages)

World Scientific Publishing Company
DOI: 10,1142/S0129065714500063

Worid Scientific
www.worldscientific.com

DETECTION OF DRIVING FATIGUE BY USING

NONCONTACT EMG AND ECG SIGNALS
MEASUREMENT SYSTEM
RONGRONG FU and HONG WANG*
Laboratory of Bio-Mechatronic Engineering
School of Mechanical Engineering and Automation
Northeastern University, Shenyang 110189, P.R. China
*hgwang@mail.neu. edu. en
Accepted 23 October 2013
Published Onhne 11 December 2013
Driver fatigue can be detected by constructing a discriminant mode using some features obtained from
physiological signals. There exist two major challenges of this kind of methods. One is how to collect
physiological signals from subjects while they are driving without any interruption. The other is to find
features of physiological signals that are of corresponding change with the loss of attention caused by
driver fatigue. Driving fatigue is detected based on the study of surface electromyography (EMG) and
electrocardiograph (ECG) during the driving period. The noncontact data acquisition system was used
to collect physiological signals from the biceps femoris of each subject to tackle the first challenge. Fast
independent component analysis (FastICA) and digital filter were utilized to process the original signals.
Based on the statistical analysis results given by Kolmogorov-Smirnov Z test, the peak factor of EMG
(p < 0.001) and the maximum of the cross-relation curve of EMG and ECG (p < 0.001) were selected
as the combined characteristic to detect fatigue of drivers. The discrinainant criterion of fatigue was
obtained from the training samples by using Mahalanobis distance, and then the average classification
accuracy was given by 10-fold cross-validation. The results showed that the method proposed in this
paper can give well performance in distinguishing the normal state and fatigue state. The noncontact,
onboard vehicle drivers' fatigue detection system was developed to reduce fatigue-related risks.
Keywords: Driver fatigue; sensor; EMG; ECG; Mahalanobis distance.

1.

Introduction

Driver fatigue progressively impairs driver's awareness about external events,^ which may result in
some abnormal driving behaviors. Although there
may exist some difficulties in estimating the seriousness of driver fatigue, the fact that driver fatigue is
one of the major hazards that contribute to transportation system^ is believed. Various studies have
shown that the driver drowsiness accounts for 16% of
all crashes and over 20% of the accidents in the highways,^^ Assessment for driver fatigue remains to be
a big challenge to meet the demands of future intelligent transportation systems, which can assist driver

to better cope with operation and reduce fatiguerelated risks.

Researchers have developed a number of fatigue
detection technologies, according to the features that
used for fatigue recognition, these technologies can
be classified into four main categories:

Gontextual features
Physiological features.
Drivers' performances and
Gombination of aforementioned features.

First, technologies-based contextual features

always rely on participants' self-report, these

* Corresponding author.
1450006-1

R. Fu & H. Wang

features from different point of views include,

(i) driver-related: personality, sleep quality, circadian rhythm and physical condition.
(ii) vehicle-related: noise, seating comfort degree
and temperature;
(iii) road-related: monotony of road, density of vehicles and the number of lanes.
Questionnaire is always used for collecting such
contextual features. Contextual features-based technologies are perhaps the easiest method by which
the extent of driver fatigue can be investigated from
these features by some statistical methods.
Second, driver fatigue may be presented on some
observable physiological features, such as features
reflect the brain activity from EEG (electroencephalogram), heart rate variability from ECG and
skin conductance detected by EMG. Detecting driver
fatigue from EEG based on the fact that EEG can
directly get abundant information on the human cognitive states.^"^'^ Another popular feature is ECG, it
contains lots of fatigue relevant information. Rogado
et al. developed a driver fatigue detection system
based on HRV from ECG during driving period.
EMG features were used by Hostens and Ramon
under high level monotonous driving condition.^^
Third, performance-based technologies focus on
inferring driver fatigue from monitoring the changes
in driver's operational performances, such as reaction time, eye blinking frequency, eye-closure rate,
eye tracking, steering angle, throttle/brake input,
speed of movement, lane deviation,^'' head nodding
and grasping position of driver's hand on steering
The previous three methods focus only on a certain aspect, they can easily lead to inaccurate results.
(i) In the technologies based on contextual features, drivers can evaluate their efficiency decline,
this results in poor performance during driving. But
self-feedback plays an important role in subjective
measurement and may be affected by subject's will
and consciousness,^^ which cannot always reflect real
objectivity.
(ii) Studies of performance-based techniques cannot prove that these abnormal behaviors are relevant
to driver's drowsiness state. Some other factors can
also result in those abnormal behaviors, like vehicle
type, driver experience and driving conditions.^^

(iii) Some validation criteria used for fatigue

recognition were based on the image processing techniques, which is not always reliable because of the
limitation of current techniques for image processing. Although there is great value for fatigue detection, many of these features were reported that they
may vary in different driving conditions.^ There are
moments when a driver still looks awake with wide
open eyes but does not process any information.^-"^
Therefore, fusing as many features as possible is a
better way to get an accurate inference^'^ and make
fatigue recognition more reliable. This is the last kind
of method, which based on the combination of aforementioned features.
Physiological features, as mentioned above, contribute significantly to fatigue recognition because a
person usually has little control over them, which
makes they could provide reliable source of information on a person's emotion.^'' Methods based on
fused physiological features are perhaps the most logical method.^^'^^ However, challenge still remains in
these methods. It is very difficult to acquire these
physiological signals in a noncontact way because
usually electrodes and wires need to be in contact
with driver directly. Then the driver will be distracted by measuring electrode inevitably.
Our study does not use the change of drivervehicle state or physical changes of subjects. We
focus on detecting fatigue using fused physiological
features extracted from EMG and ECG. To overcome the weakness of physiological approach, recording electrodes were planted into car cushion to collect
physiological signals from biceps femoris of each subject. Our data acquisition system consists of recording electrodes and amplifier. The design details are
shown in Appendix A. We used noncontact measurement to avoid any interfering with driving operations. Recorded signal contains both EMG and ECG.
There are noise and artifact contained in recorded
signal induced by breath and movement of driver
which are unavoidable.^^ Given the above, monitoring some features of EMG and ECG may be
a promising method for detecting drivers' fatigue.
Meanwhile, considered components of the raw signal recorded by the sensor from the biceps femoris
of each subject, FastICA and digital filter were utilized to process the original signals in this paper.
And with the help of them, not only the EMG
and ECG could be separated, but also separated

1450006-2

Detection of Driving Fatigue by Using Noncontact EMG and ECG Signals Measurement System

signals were free from noise and artifact contamination. Then some features of driving fatigue were
studied, based on the statistical analysis results given
by Kolmogorov-Smirnov Z test, peak factor of EMG
[p < 0.001) and maximum of cross-relation curve of
EMG and EGG {p < 0.001) were selected as combined features to detect fatigue of drivers. Thus,
Mahalanobis distance (MD) was used to obtain discriminant mode, performance of proposed method
was validated on datasets with different states by 10fold cross-validation. Based on these, a noncontact
onboard vehicle drivers' fatigue detection system is
presented, which is capable of monitoring EMG and
EGG, and detecting drivers' fatigue automatically.
2.
2.1.

Material and Methods

Subjects

Eight healthy volunteers (five males and three

females, age: 24.75 2.76) with no history of sleep
related disease participated in these experiments. In
order to make the subjects go into the fatigue state
within the limited time, they all have driving experiences less than two years. This will be discussed in
Sec. 4. Alcohol, tea, coffee or any other drinks that
can bring excitement to nerve were prohibited within
24 h before the beginning of the experiment. Prior
to the experiments, subjects familiarized themselves
with the operation of driving simulator. All these
experiments were performed after we got informed
consent of the procedures of experiments from all
participants.
2.2.

Experimental design and protocol

The experiment time involved 2-2.5 h per subject

and was conducted almost between 12 pm to 3 pm.
The experimental protocol (see Fig. 1) began with
Data recording

Data recording
]^
5min

2h
J
Driving period

lOmin
L

Postdr iving
sitting

Idle

5min
I
Post -rest
sitting

Eig. 1. The procedure of experiment. It began with

two-hour simulated driving, then was a post-driving section last 5 min. And next 10-min idle part without data
recording was given to subject for their rest. Another 5min data post-rest part.

two-hour simulated driving, following that, there was

a post-driving section for 5 min. And next 10 min
were given to subjects for their rest, this part is called
as idle part. Another 5-min data was recorded after
the idle part. During the idle period, subjects were
asked to take deep breaths and relax themselves as
much as they can. No data recording occurred during
idle part.
Driving involves the participants with very few
road stimuli, so the monotonous highway is adopted
as road scene here. Automatic control of vehicle
was selected with fine weather. All these designs are
because of the fact that driver fatigue easily happens under the monotonous conditions.^^ Monotony
of highway is classified as one exogenous factors
of fatigue. Automatic control of vehicle and fine
weather are other two factors that provide drivers
the highest monotonous task performance.
Data acquisition is realized by using the noncontact DAQ (data acquisition) system. The design
detail will be given in Appendix A. Recording electrodes were placed on the top surface of car seat
cushion. Data were acquired from the biceps femoris
without direct contact while the subjects were sitting
on it.
2.3.

Fatigue detection system

Fatigue detection is realized by two parts as shown

in Fig. 2, classifier design and unknown status classification decision. Glassifier design aims to get discriminant criterion of fatigue by using training set
data with known category of each record. In order to
give accurate labels to data in training set, subjects
will raise their hands when they feel drowsy, which
is used to differentiate alertness and drowsiness of
subject. Gonsidering the disturbance caused by this
movement, we do not analyze the data in five minutes
before and after this movement. It can be seen as the
boundary of alert and drowsy state. After data acquisition, raw signals will be analyzed by preprocessing, artifact removal and computation of features for
fatigue estimation. In feature selection, some parameters can be used as features of fatigue because they
have consistent change among different subjects. Following that, discriminant criterion will be obtained
by MD. Same processing has been applied to data
with unknown status, the classification result will
be given by the discriminant criterion obtained from
classifier design. So Fig. 2 gives general idea of this

1450006-3

R. Fu & H. Wang

Classifier design
Diia in
training sel

Data analysis

Feature selection

DiscrimintH
cnlcnon

Feature

Classification
decision

\!/
Dala uialysis

Dala acquisition

Classification decision of unknown status

\
ClassitT cation
results

Fig. 2. Fatigue detection system. Classifier design was finished in calibration part by training data. And classification of
samples with unknown status was realized as lower part in Fig. 2. Program flow is represented by solid arrows. And the
dashed arrows connect each two parts using similar process.

paper and the details will also be discussed in the

following sections.
2.3.1.

Data pre-processing

The aim of data pre-processing is the extraction of

homogeneous signal parts, which provides analysis
and processing algorithm with the capacity of identifying EMG and EGG components clearly. Recorded
signal can be defined as the sum of different processes:
N

x{t) = A

'emgV

(1)
=1

where A is an unknown mixing matrix which represents weights of EMG signal (semg) and EGG signal
(secg), the term of Ni{t) includes various artifacts
to be removed to get EMG and EGG, such as baseline noise induced by breath and body movement
of driver and the 50 Hz electronic noise. Gonsidering
various components of raw signal recorded by sensor
from biceps femoris of each subject, FastlGA and
digital filter are utilized to process original signals to
extract EMG and EGG in this paper.
The goal of FastlGA^^"'^'' is to estimate the
independent components from observed mixture X,
which is obtained from mixing model as X = AS,
where A is an unknown mixing matrix, and S is
unknown source signals. So FastlGA focuses on estimating de-mixing matrix W to get independent
source U form de-mixing model U = WZ, where

Z is whitened data of observed data X. When

using the FastlGA, the setup information should
be noticed first. There are two kinds of operation
for de-correlation in FastlGA: symmetric and deflation. For this paper, symmetric operation is preferred for de-correlation approach. In most cases,
these two approaches can give good performance for
source extraction generally, but when considering
the constraint on the computational burden, symmetric method should be preferred over the deflation method. And another important information for
FastlGA setup is the adaptation of the nonlinearities. In the general case, it is necessary to make
the algorithm converge to the right solution, i.e. to
make the estimator consistent, and to guarantee local
stability. Especially in the FastlGA algorithm, adaptation of the nonlinearities will increase the statistical performance of the method. Hyvarinen^'' gave
the possible nonlinearity functions: gi = tanh(aiti),
g2 = uexp{-a2u'^/2) and 53 = u^, where 1 < ai < 2,
02 ~ 1 and 1 is the default value of ai and 02. Nonlinearity functions used here was 'tanh', it is a good
general-purpose nonlinearity function.
EMG and EGG signal can be separated by using
FastlGA, but the results still present little signal
aliasing of each other. Baseline noises are still contained in them, which becomes the reason to use
digital filter to process signal further. And with the
help of them, we can separate EMG and EGG, and
meanwhile separated signals are free from noise and

1450006-4

Detection of Driving

by Using Noncontact EMG and ECG Signals Measurement System

artifact contamination. Tbe result will be sbown in

Sec. 3.1.
2.3.2.

Fc = ,

(2)

wbere A is amplitude of EMG and x^^s represents

tbe square root of EMG.
Metbod of obtaining maximum of crossrelation^^'^^ curve of EMG and ECG can be roughly
sbown in Fig. 3. hi and m were obtained by dividing
ECG and EMG into tbe overlapping segments using
4-s sfiding windows witb 50% overlap.^'^ Maximum
value of cross-relation between hi and m was named
as cor-max.;. All tbese maximum values were used as
feature named maximum of cross-relation curve.
Discriminant

mi

cor_max2

Feature selection

Some features of driving fatigue based on EMG and

ECG were studied. Tbey all gave some cbanges as
time went on, but unfortunately some of them could
not give consistent cbange witb fatigue degree among
different subjects. And tbe aiming of feature selection is to get features to detect fatigue state witbout
affection of randomness of pbysiological signals.
Based on tbe statistical analysis results given by
Kolmogorov-Smirnov Z test, peak factor of EMG
{p < 0.001) and maximum of cross-relation curve
of EMG and ECG (p < 0.001) sbowed tbe significant difference of two sets of value, and tbey gave
consistent trend among different subjects, so tbey
were selected as combining feature to detect fatigue
of drivers.
More specifically, peak factor of EMG signal can
be defined as follow:

2.4.

cor_maxi

cor_max3

m3

cor_maxn,

hn-l

cor_maxn.i

in.i

cor_max

Fig. 3. Procedure for maximum of cross-relation curve.

Epoch EMG and EGG into the overlapping segments
using sliding windows with 50% overlap to compute each
maximum value from cross-relation curve. All these maximum values are used as feature named maximum of crossrelation curve of EMG and EGG.
MD from vector x to eacb mean vector ^t, assign
X to tbe category of tbe nearest mean. ^ can be
estimated by tbe samples in training set as,
-S^i = TF 7

X - Mz X - Hif

- ^ - ^ 1 + 77-^2,

-1,2,

(5)

wbere iV denotes tbe total number of data points in

group Gi. Mniean represents tbe mean vector of fi^
and //2, discriminant function can be estimated as.
(6)

criterion

was used in tbis paper aiming to get discriminant criterion, wbicb is a distance measure based
on correlations between variables. It is often used to
measure tbe degree of abnormality as compared to
normal conditions. Tbe calculation of MD between a
vector X and group G is given as follows.

3.

Results

In Sec. 2.3, we gave tbe principle of tbe metbods

involved in tbis paper. To see bow tbese work in tbis
section, we sbow some results accordingly.
3.1.

Data pre-processing

-1

d(x,G) =

(3)

wbere /x and J2 ^^e tbe mean vector and tbe covariance matrix of G. Tbe decision rule can be stated
very simply: to classify a feature vector measure tbe

Recorded data from biceps femoris of eacb subject

included some noise and artifact as mentioned, wbicb
were inevitable. 15-s epocb of observed signals were
used as an example and independent components
(ICs) can be obtained by FastICA, as sbown in Fig. 4.

1450006-5

R. Fu & H. Wang

I O

-2

FastICA

-4

(a)
Fig. 4. Demonstration of signal separation by FastICA. (a) 15-s epoch of observed signals containing ECG, EMG and
beiseline noise, (b) Corresponding independent components (ICs) roughly for heart activity (top one) and muscle activity
(lower one).

The stability indexes of IGA decomposition given

by repeating the estimates''^ using FastlGA for 100
times are 0,9841 and 0,9840, respectively, which verify the stability of IGs,
From Fig, 4(b), detail of IGs shows that EMG and
EGG were roughly separated, but they still cannot be
considered as final results because there existed small
extent aliasing in both of them and baseline noise

contamination was not filtered. So these signals need

further processing to achieve satisfactory results.
According to previous studies, most of the information contained in EGG are found between 0.5 and
50Hz.^ EMG should have the frequency range from
10 to 300 Hz.'*! By using band-pass filter, EGG and
EMG are shown in Fig, 5,

10

15

Fig, 5, The ECG and EMG, Comparing with signals' detail shown in Fig. 4(b), the baseline noise contamination and
small extent aliasing are elinainated by using band-pass filter.
1450006-6

Detection of Driving Fatigue by Using Noncontact EMG and ECG Signals Measurement System

3.2.

Features

3.3.

In the two-hour driving section, every 10 min, 30-s

length of data were extracted. Other two 30-s length
of data were also extracted from post-driving part
and post-rest sitting part, respectively. So in total,
we got 14 periods of 30-s time epochs. All the
extracted data were pre-processed in the same way
as mentioned in Sec. 3.1.
As discussed in Sec. 2.3.2, peak factor and maximum of cross-relation curve were selected as the
combined features to detect fatigue of drivers. We
got similar trend among different subjects in these
two features, but the main problem is that different amplitudes of alert and drowsiness tend to
fluctuate significantly within different time period
of different subjects,"*^ so normalization is used
here.
The upper sub-figure in Fig. 6 was plotted by
using all peak factor (Fc) after normalization, and
maximum of cross-relation curve (cor_max) after normalization was shown in the lower sub-figure in
Fig. 6. The horizontal axes represented the time section. These two features gave the consistent tendency
in detecting the state of fatigue.

Discriminant case

Detection of driver fatigue is similar to medical diagnosis, which can often be understood as a supervised
learning.^^"*^ To construct discriminant model, we
choose data of one subject as example. 130 samples
from the first experiment were employed as training
set. Among them, there are 65 alert samples versus
65 fatigue samples. And next day, at the same time,
we have the driving section experiment on the same
subject. Then 30 samples was selected as test set.^^
So we obtained a dataset with 160 samples containing two states, subset Gi is alert state and subset
G2 is fatigue state. To measure the success of classification process, we split these data into training
and test set.''^*'' Considering two features Fc and
corjnax, which are mentioned in Sec. 3.2, discriminant criterion could be obtained by MD (see Sec. 2.4)
using data in training set as,
W = -2.5952Fc - 8.5541cor.max -f3.3985.

(7)

Using the test features, confusion matrix could be

seen as Table 1 below.
One of the most common techniques to prove
the stability of algorithm is replication of training

6
7
8
time sectioii

7
8
time section

10

11

12

13

14

Fig. 6. The two normalized features used to estimating the driver fatigue. The upper one is peak factor {Fc), and the
lower sub-figure is maximum of cross-relation curve (cor_max).
1450006-7

R. Fu & H. Wang

Table 1. Confusion matrix.

4.

Actual class
Alert
Predicated class
Alert
15
Fatigue
4
Recall

0.7895

Fatigue

Precision

0
11

1
0.7333

Accuracy = 0.8667

Table 2. Mean test results given by

10-fold cross validation.

0.9040
0.8345

Recall
Alert
Eatigue

0.8162
0.9138

El score
Alert
Eatigue

0.8572
0.8718

Accuracy

0.8650

First, about design of the experiment protocol, there

is a fact that simulator can cause higher sleepiness
levels than real driving.^^ xhis could be possibly
explained by the fact that in simulated driving condition with fewer stimuli there were lots of movements
that can be avoided, meanwhile, subjects driving in
simulator is much safer than real condition which
makes them feel relaxed, so they may go into fatigue
state easily.
Second, for selection of subjects, novice drivers
(driving experience less than 2 years) accept and
process almost all the information, which costs a lot
of energy and speed the onset of fatigue feeling in
short time.^^'^'^

Mean of 10 folds
Precision
Alert
Eatigue

Discussion

by A"-fold cross-validation.4^'''i Then 10-fold crossvalidation was used for assessing the classification
accuracy,'^^''"''^ the mean values of test results are
shown in Table 2.

Third, in data acquisition, recorded data involved

EMG, EGG and artifacts. This depends on the
location of data collection, and heartbeat causes a
relatively high electric field in human body. This can
explain the larger amplitude of EGG than that of
EMG in Fig. 4(a). After obtaining EMG and EGG,
we still have some interests in lower frequency parts
of each IGs. As we know that low frequency components represent the trend of signal, so in Fig. 7, we
plotted the low-frequency residual of IGl and IG2,
respectively.
There are some interesting facts in Fig. 7.
Under driving situation, resident of IGl give us

15

Eig. 7.

The residual of ICs. The signal in upper sub-figure is residual of ICI, and the lower one is residual of IC2.
1450006-8

Detection of Driving Fatigue by Using Noncontact EMG and ECG Signals Measurement System

0.5
0.45

Fc
cor-max

0.4
0.35
0.3
0.25
0.2
0.15
0.1
0.05
0

alert

fatigue

Fig. 8. The bar graph with error of two features. Similar graphs can be useful for comparing significant differences of
features between the subgroups.
approximately six ups and downs during the 15 s,
which is corresponding to the fact that normal range
of breaths is between 12 and 25, and the average resting respiratory rate for adults is 12-20 breaths per
minute. ^^ And compared to IGs contained baseline
noise as shown in Fig. 4(b), the resident of IG2 gave
the trend of EMG. To make the recognition of this
trend easily, we selected a section of postural signal
as example, which means that the change of baseline is not induced by muscle contraction, because
muscle contraction can cause EMG amplitude grow
suddenly. So these may explain the observation of
baseline noise induced by respiration and body movement of subjects. But there may still exist some other
factors which can lead to the change of baseline.
These need further studies.
Fourth, we used FastlGA to realize the rough separation of EMG and EGG, but for all IGA including
FastlGA, they have two intrinsic limitations, these
are (a) magnitude and scaling ambiguity: in IGA
there is no sufficient information to estimate the true
variance of independent components and (b) permutation ambiguity: IGA gives unspecified order of estimated independent components.'''^ And fortunately,
these ambiguities are insignificant in application of
this paper. On one hand, pre-whitening provides
great solution for the first ambiguity. On the other
hand, EMG and EGG have inherent difference, they

can be recognized without influence of the permutation ambiguity.

Fifth, significant difference of features was found
by Kolmogorov-Smirnov Z test, in order to show this
14

Fc

12
driving
section

1 2

6 7 8 9
time section

10 11 12 13 14 15

02

cor-max
0.15

dnving
section

01

* *

^i

005

1 2

6 7 8 9
time section

10 11 12 13 14 15

Fig. 9. The trends of features which given by mean

value with error bar of each data section, as we mentioned above, the data used to analyze was composed 14
data sections, the first 12 sections is extracted from driving section, and the data section with '*' means that this
data is from post-driving section, and the last data with
'**' is the post-rest sitting data.

1450006-9

R. Fu & H. Wang

clearly, tbe bar grapb witb error of tbese two features

is sbown in Fig. 8.
And in order to see tbe trend of features, mean
value witb error of data from 14 periods is illustrated
in Fig. 9. Tbese two features present tbe similar
trend, tbe upper sub-figure gives trend of peak factor
(Fc) and trend of maximum of cross-relation curve
(cor_max) is sbown in lower sub-figure of Fig. 9. We
bave extracted 14 sections data to be processed, borizontal axes represent number of time section. During tbe 2-b driving period tbey botb bave upward
trend generally and downward trend occurs in botb
post-driving and post-rest pbase, wbicb means tbat
driver fatigue increased witb tbe longer driving time
and decreased wben driving pbase was over. And
downward trend last to post-rest pbase after 10-min
idle part, so post-rest pbase bas more lower indices
tban post-driving pbase.

5.

Conclusion

Viewed from an ergonomie aspect witb respect to tbe

product development, a noncontact sensitive measurement of driver fatigue is investigated during tbe
continuous driving. And tbere are tbree main findings in tbe current study: (i) It provides a bardware
design detail of DAQ system tbat realize noncontact
sensitive measurement of fatigue, (ii) Tbis current
study detects driver fatigue based on an objective
evaluation of their driving abilities by using the fused
EMG and ECG features, (iii) It provides discriminant criterion of fatigue by using MD witb tbe ultimate objective of reducing drivers' fatigue and save
human lives. Meanwbile, 10-fold cross-validation was
used to validate performance of discriminant criterion. Tbe results sbowed tbat tbe metbod proposed
in tbis paper can give good performance in distinguisbing alert state and fatigue state. Noncontact
measurement can be realized, wbicb provides a new
metbod to detect driver fatigue.
However, it should be noted tbat altbougb tbis
study bas produced some promising results for
fatigue recognition, tbere still exist some improvements tbat need to be aware of. First, tbe algorithm used for detecting drivers' fatigue in tbis
paper is simple to be implemented in bardware. It
focused on development of a simple, low-cost and
onboard vebicle drivers' fatigue detection device.
Tbe detection accuracy can be improved by using

more sophisticated features and classifiers. Some

senior autbors used information quantification,^^
conventional and wavelet coberence^"'^'^ as features. Some algoritbms integrated tbe nonlinear
science-based cbaos tbeory,^^"^^ wavelets,^^"^'' signal
processing tecbnique neural networks^^"''^ and pattern recognition tecbniques, such as cbaos-waveletneural network algoritbm, spiking neural networks
algoritbm, mechanism-based hierarcbical neural networks,''^ some enbanced probabilistic neural network
algoritbm.^ Tbese algoritbms can be used in tbis
fatigue detection system, but more additional work
and more powerful computing capabilities are still
needed. Second, modern tecbnologies, sucb as wireless communication and some cell pbone devices,^
can be involved in tbis system. Tbe wireless communication can make signal measurement more easier, like infra-red or Bluetooth tecbnologies. Wben
fatigue is detected, some alert text can be sent to
tbe cell pbone. Tbird, tbis system can be extended
to include otber features of ECG to monitor cardiac
activities and detect tbe relevant cardiac pathologies.
Acknowledgments
Tbis work was supported by Natural Science Foundation of Cbina (Project No. 61071057) and Fundamental Research Funds for tbe Central Universities of
Cbina (Project No. N100603003). Tbe autbor would
fike to tbank Dr. Shahni Puwar, Dr. Wenbo Zbao
and Dr. Morteza Delgir for belpful discussions about
tbe manuscript. In addition, tbe autbors would like
to tbank tbe reviewers and tbe editor, wbose inputs
significantly improved tbis manuscript.
Appendix A: DAQ System
In application of tbis paper, two pieces of conductive knit fabric with tbe size of 12 cm x 22 cm

1450006-10

conductive fabric
cloth

skin

J..s;:i:

body ,.
Fig. A.I.

Noncontact electrode.

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Fig. A.3. Main circuit board of finished amplifier.

was sewn on top surface of car cushion parallely. Reference electrode located on the left ankle
bone.
This conductive knit fabric is silver-plated nylon
that is stretched in both directions. It is highly conductive with a surface resistivity of < 1 Q/sq. It can
collect data when the subject wears normal pants
with width less than 2 mm. Physiological signals with
variable electric potential can be seen as AC power.
Skin and conductive knit fabric were regarded as the
two plates of parallel plate capacitor, meanwhile, the
pants were seen as insulation. Principle of capacitivecoupling is satisfied in this case. So the basic theory
of noncontract electrode can be described as Fig. A.I.
These two pieces of conductive knit fabric were used
as electrodes to collect mixed signals of ECG and
EMG data in noncontact way.
This noncontact electrode is very suitable for
long-term physiological signal acquisition. However,
comparing with contact electrode, data collected
by using noncontact electrode is much weaker and
signal-to-noise-ratio is relatively lower. Then, the
crucial aspect was the design of amplifier.
Taking into account all these aspects, we designed
an amplifier with the structure shown in Fig. A.2, the
main circuit board of finished amplifier can be seen
as Fig. A.3.
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