2016 IEEE 5th Global Conference on Consumer Electronics

A Wearable-Glasses-based Drowsiness-Fatigue-
Detection System for Improving Road Safety

Liang-Bi Chen1,2, Wan-Jung Chang3*, Jian-Ping Su3, Ji-Yi Ciou3, Yi-Jhan Ciou3, Cheng-Chin Kuo3,
and Katherine Shu-Min Li1
1
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan
2
BXB Electronics Co., Ltd., Kaohsiung, Taiwan
3
Department of Electronic Engineering, Southern Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Tainan, Taiwan
liangbi.chen@gmail.com; *allenchang@stust.edu.tw

Abstract—This paper proposes a drowsiness-fatigue-detection Wang et al. [4] proposed three-tiered real-time networked
(DFD) system for improving road safety, which consists of a service architecture for recognizing the state of driver to ensure
wearable smart glasses, an in-vehicle infotainment system (a driving safety.
vehicular telematics device), an automotive diagnostic bridge,
and a cloud-based platform, etc. The proposed DFD system can Although many related DFD Systems have been developed,
real-time detect driver’s state for drowsiness or fatigue. When however, these DFD systems belong to passive systems that
detecting drowsiness or fatigue situation occurrence, thus the still lack active-based DFD system development.
rear lights of the vehicle will automatically be flickered and
message will be sent to the cloud-based platform, concurrently.
To face this situation, in this paper, we propose an active-
Hence, the proposed system can effectively achieve the purpose of based DFD system which related procedures of road safety will
road safety improvement. be automatically started. The proposed DFD system adopts
smart glasses as our main media to detect driver situation of
Keywords—driver condition monitoring; drowsiness-fatigue- drowsiness and fatigue for improving road safety.
detection systems; internet of things (IoT); road safety; vehicular
accidents; wearable devices. II. THE PROPOSED DFD SYSTEM
A. System Architecture
I. INTRODUCTION
The system architecture of the proposed DFD system as
Nowadays, vehicle accidents are occurred every day around shown in Fig.1 The proposed DFD system consists of a smart
the world. For example, in 2007, there were approximately 55, glasses, an in-vehicle infotainment system (a vehicular
926 vehicles occurred in vehicle collisions accidents, 9,979 of telematics device), an OBD-II bridge, a cloud-based platform,
which owing to driver drowsiness, fatigue and inattention [1]. and an electronic control unit (ECU) for controlling rear
However, how to efficiently avoid the vehicle accidents reminding lights.
occurrence by the modern information and communications
technologies (ICTs) has widely been attracted, studied and
developed [1]-[4]. According to the previous researched works
[1], [4] clearly identified that the drowsiness and fatigue are
one of the major causes of vehicle accidents.
To trace the above mentioned issues, Chacon-Murguia and
Prieto-Resendiz [1] executed a complete survey of driver
drowsiness-/fatigue-detection (DFD) systems and its related
technologies.
Rodríguez-Ibáñez et al. [2] analyzed more than 100 hours
of driving in real environment cases and also presented a three-
phases drowsiness detection methodology with some variables Fig. 1. System architecture of the proposed system.
(behavior, EEG, and PERCLOS).
The smart glasses are based on traditional glasses which is
Chang et al. [3] implemented a smartphone-based driver added some extra modules including a miniature infrared (IR)
assistance system which the front and rear cameras are used to senor, a microcontroller (MCU), and a Bluetooth low energy
recognize the face, eye, and mouth of the driver. Moreover, a (BLE). The photograph of the proposed smart glasses
warning voice will be broadcasted when the status of prototype is demonstrated in Fig. 2. The photograph of an in-
drowsiness of driver is detected. This assistance system can vehicle infotainment system (a vehicular telematics device) is
also calculate the distance between the driver and the vehicle in shown in Fig. 3.
front.
This work was partially supported by the Ministry of Science and
Technology (MoST), Taiwan, under grants, MOST-105-2632-E-218-002 and
MOST-105-2622-E-218-003-TE2. *Corresponding Author: Prof. Wan-Jung
Chang.

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Tecnologica

Fig. 2. The photograph of the proposed smart glasses prototype.
Fig. 3. The photograph of an in-vehicle infotainment system (a vehicular
telematics device).
The smart glasses in front of the miniature infrared sensor
continuously monitors voltage signal of driver eyelids, and
sends voltage variables to MCU.
A firmware program was written in the MCU of the
proposed smart glasses. The firmware has two major partitions.
The first partition is initialized setup partition which is to learn
and record each driver’s characteristics such as surface shape,
pupil, and nose. The second partition is drowsiness and fatigue
detection algorithm. Hence, when a tendency of drowsiness
and fatigue is detected, thus the MCU in glasses will
immediately send related instructions to telematics device via
BLE.
After receiving the drowsiness and fatigue event, in-vehicle
speakers can also generate tones sound to alert driver.
Moreover, rear lights of the vehicle will automatically be
flickered controlled by ECU via CAN bus and OBD-II bridge
[5], [6] for reminding the rear of the vehicles.
In addition to this fatigue and drowsiness driving event will
also be immediately recorded related information including
vehicle license number, detected date/time, happened place
(GPS), etc.
This information is sent to the cloud-based platform (as can
be seen in Fig. 4) via Wi-Fi or LTE. It is very important
function that we can immediately monitor the drivers who are
fatigue and drowsiness, and immediately execute suitable
disposal for improving road safety.
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2016 IEEE 5th Global Conference on Consumer Electronics
Fig. 4. The cloud-based platform for recording fatigue and drowsiness
driving events.
III. CONCLUSION
In this paper, a wearable-glasses-based drowsiness-fatigue-
detection (DFD) system has been proposed to achieve road
safety. We have demonstrated functions of the proposed DFD
system. The proposed DFD has also successfully applied in a
real vehicle. Compared to previous DFD systems, the
proposed DFD system is more active ability to process related
contingent events to achieve the purpose of the road safety
improvement.
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