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Abstract— There is growing acknowledgement that fatigue a problem in all 24-hour operations, but the real danger is
plays a significant role in traffic accidents. This study evaluated the occurrence of MSE. During MSE, the operator is inca-
the relationship between fatigue-related accidents and Micro- pable of responding to outside events. The brain has, in some
Sleep Events (MSE) using a real car driving simulator. Ten sense, turned its self off for a few moments. If nothing in the
healthy volunteers participated in the study for two nights each. work environment changes during a MSE, there are no con-
After a period of struggling against sleep pressure, all subjects sequences. But if something happens, if there is a curve in the
experienced periods of extreme fatigue and Micro-Sleep Events road, if the car in front breaks, or your truck drifts of out its
(MSE). Most MSE had no consequences, but some resulted di- lane, there is an immediate risk of an accident. Perhaps the
rectly in an accident. To establish a correlation between MSE most frightening thing about MSE is that they mostly happen
and fatigue related accidents all MSE were counted separately without awareness or forewarning. This has been observed
for driving sessions with and without accidents. Accident proba- numerous times during our night time driving simulator stud-
bility was calculated as the ratio of the number of MSE in the ac- ies.
cident sessions to the total number of MSE. Under the extremely Despite the high accident potential of MSE, most research
fatiguing protocols the overall accident probability was 35 %. in this field was and is focused on general driver fatigue
[Torsval et al. 1987], [Jung et al. 1997].
Keywords— Accident probability, Micro Sleep Event Duration, Recently, the MSE detection issue received some long
Correlations Micro-Sleep Events - Accident Events
overdue attention [Blaivas et al. 2007], [Davidson et al.
2007]. However, the direct quantitative relationships between
I. I NTRODUCTION MSE frequency and accident probability have not yet been
reported. To establish such a relationship requires a reliable,
In general, driver fatigue [Mackie 1977], [Moore-Ede continuous MSE detection capability.
1993] can be characterized by many features, such as a de- However, many researchers try to explain MSE based on
crease in mental and physical performance, reduced vigi- certain EEG rules, similar to the sleep onset classification.
lance, loss of cognitive and logical reasoning skills, impaired [Sommer et al. 2001] have shown that the EEG characteris-
judgment, reduced motor coordination, slower reaction time, tics during MSE is quite complex and that only rule free clas-
absentmindedness, mental lapses, uncharacteristic mistakes, sification tools allow reliable MSE detection based on EEG.
erratic behavior, and the occurrence of Micro-Sleep Events In [Golz et al. 2007] and [Davidson et al. 2007], MSE classi-
(MSE). It is important to note that many individuals are either fication based on EEG and EOG analysis utilizing rule free,
not aware of the degree of impairment produced by fatigue, modern classification tools, such as Support Vector Machines
or they are not able to recognize the early symptoms of MSE. and Tapped delay-line Multilayer Perceptron networks, were
Within the public sector, inattention and driver fatigue (in- presented. [Paul et al., 2005] have shown that an increasing
cluding MSE) are significant factors in commercial truck number of MSE can be associated with worsening overall
crashes, conservatively accounting for 1,200 deaths and driving performance.
76,000 injuries annually at an estimated cost of $12.4 billion.
Fatigued drivers are often not aware of their condition, fre-
quently driving for repetitive episodes of 3-12 seconds with II. E XPERIMENTAL S ETUP
their eyes totally closed. These drivers are experiencing dan-
The study was conducted in the laboratory of adaptive
gerous Micro-Sleep Events (MSE) because they are mentally
biosignal analysis at the University of Applied Sciences,
incapacitated during the MSE periods. In some accident re-
Schmalkalden (Germany). The lab has a sophisticated, real
ports fatigue is named as contributing factor, when the real
car driving simulator and extensive experience conducting
factor was very likely a single MSE. Of course, fatigue is
these types of studies. The equipment used is fully controlled
by specialized software, allowing regulation of light levels, ously observed behavior. The AE probability for a single time
car environment (temperature, noise level, humidity), and of window was defined on a set of binary values, where ’zero’
controls and instruments. Ten volunteers participated in the means that no AE occurred during the whole 4 minute time
study, 8 men and 2 women. The average age was 25.2 ± 3.5 window and ’one’ means that at least one or more AE oc-
(range 20 - 29). They were all healthy, and kept regular sleep curred in the 4 minute window. The overall AE probability
/ wake schedules. Volunteers arrived at the lab at 11 pm. Af- was thus defined as the ratio of the number of time windows
ter wire-up, experimental sessions started at 1 am. There were with at least one AE and the total number of time windows.
seven experimental sessions, with the last session starting at 7
am. Each driving session had duration of 40 minutes. Several IV. R ESULTS
bio-signals were recorded: EEG (FP1, FP2, C3, Cz, C4, O1,
O2, A1, A2), EOG (vertical, horizontal), ECG, and EMG. As expected, the percentage MSE duration and AE proba-
In addition, three video recordings (driver’s head & pose, bility increased progressively through the night. This can be
driver’s eyes, driving scene) were stored. Extreme values of observed on a subject specific level (Figure 2, 3) and for all
Variation of Lane Deviation (VLD) were used to determine 10 subjects (Figure 4) on average. As a general observation,
the Accident Events (AE). MSE and AE scoring began im- we found that the AE probability moved from 0 to 1 as soon
mediately and continued throughout the driving sessions by as the MSE duration reaches 0.5 (50 % of the 4 minute time
two researchers who watched the video streams. Time stamps window). This can be considered as an empirical threshold.
were set for typical signs of MSE (e.g. prolonged eyelid clo-
sures, rolling eye movements, head nodding) and major AE
(e.g. driving incidents and drift-out-of-lane accidents). In all,
2,290 MSE were found (per subject: mean number 229 ±
67, range 138 - 363) and 668 AE (per subject: mean number
66.8 ± 54, range 7 - 193). Typical sequences of MSE and AE
are depicted in figure 1.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Part of this work was supported by the German Federal
Ministry of Education and Research through the ”Applica-
tive Research and Development at Universities of Applied
Sciences” program.
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