Computational Design and Development of On-Board Device for Driver’s Health Monitoring using Microfluidic Technology

As more accidents happen, particularly in continuous driving in commercial vehicles, maintaining safety while operating a vehicle on congested highways and roads is becoming increasingly difficult. Continuous driving may impair a driver’s ability to drive safely by reducing their attention span, environmental awareness, situational awareness, and critical decision-making abilities. It’s critical to have a system in place to monitor the health of the driver because the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTS) estimates that each year there are 100,000 police-reported crashes involving drowsy driving and fatigue, which result in close to 800 fatalities and 50,000 injuries. This paper introduces a new, highly advanced driver health and fatigue monitoring system that continuously monitors the health of the driver and displays information onboard. In this paper, we first highlight issues and emerging trends in the research community for fatigue management and health monitoring while driving, and secondly, we also propose a model that consists of a microfluidic chip that senses sweat and measures blood cortisol levels, which is integrated with a signal processing unit and an onboard display unit. This introduces the idea of safety due to fatigue. Conceptually, we designed and simulated the microfluidic sensors in COMSOL Multiphysics and examined the outcomes.