Analysis of the Relationship Between Physiological Signals and Vehicle Maneuvers During a Naturalistic Driving Study

As a driver prepares to complete a maneuver, his/her internal cognitive state triggers physiological responses that are manifested, for example, in changes in heart rate (HR), breath rate (BR), and electrodermal activity (EDA). This process opens opportunities to understand driving events by observing the physiological data of the driver. In particular, this work studies the relation between driver maneuvers and physiological signals during naturalistic driving recordings. It presents both feature and discriminant analysis to investigate how physiological data can signal driver’s responses for planning, preparation, and execution of driving maneuvers. We study recordings with extreme values in the physiological data (high and low values in HR, BR, and EDA). The analysis indicates that most of these events are associated with driving events. We evaluate the values obtained from physiological signals as the driver complete specific maneuvers. We observe deviations from typical physiological responses during normal driving recordings that are statistically significant. These results are validated with binary classification problems, where the task is to recognize between a driving maneuver and a normal driving condition (e.g., left turn versus normal). The average F1-score of these classifiers is 72.8%, demonstrating the discriminative power of features extracted from physiological signals.