Automatic detection of drowsiness in EEG records based on multimodal analysis

Drowsiness is one of the main causal factors in many traffic accidents due to the clear decline in the attention and recognition of danger drivers, diminishing vehicle-handling abilities. The aim of this research is to develop an automatic method to detect the drowsiness stage in EEG records using time, spectral and wavelet analysis. A total of 19 features were computed from only one EEG channel to differentiate the alertness and drowsiness stages. After a selection process based on lambda of Wilks criterion, 7 parameters were chosen to feed a Neural Network classifier. Eighteen EEG records were analyzed. The method gets 87.4% and 83.6% of alertness and drowsiness correct detections rates, respectively. The results obtained indicate that the parameters can differentiate both stages. The features are easy to calculate and can be obtained in real time. Those variables could be used in an automatic drowsiness detection system in vehicles, thereby decreasing the rate of accidents caused by sleepiness of the driver.