Driver Drowsiness Detection Based on Humantenna Effect for Automotive Safety Systems

Car accidents due to driver drowsiness are a major concern for the automotive industry, hence, great effort and budget are invested towards advanced automotive safety. A wide range of sensors are currently being considered in automotive safety. The majority of these sensors are intended for biological measurements such as respiration activity, heartbeat, blood's alcohol concentration, etc. System complexity and implementation cost are some of the challenging design requirements, which affect the widespread usage of such sensors. In this paper, a simple and inexpensive passive touch sensor based on the humantenna effect is proposed and tested to detect driver drowsiness.