A Brain Wave-Verified Driver Alert System for Vehicle Collision Avoidance

Collision alert and avoidance systems (CAS) could help to minimize driver errors. They are instrumental as an advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) when the vehicle is facing potential hazards. Developing effective ADAS/CAS, which provides alerts to the driver, requires a fundamental understanding of human sensory perception and response capabilities. This research explores the premise that external stimulation can effectively improve drivers’ reaction and response capabilities. Therefore this article proposes a light-emitting diode (LED)-based driver warning system to prevent potential collisions while evaluating novel signal processing algorithms to explore the correlation between driver brain signals and external visual stimulation. When the vehicle approaches emerging obstacles or potential hazards, an LED light box flashes to warn the driver through visual stimulation to avoid the collision through braking. Thirty (30) subjects completed a driving simulator experiment under different near-collision scenarios. The Steady-State Visually Evoked Potentials (SSVEP) of the drivers’ brain signals and their collision mitigation (control performance) data were analyzed to evaluate the LED warning system’s effectiveness. The results show that (1) The proposed modified canonical correlation analysis evaluation (CCA-EVA) algorithm can detect SSVEP responses with 4.68% higher accuracy than the Adaptive Kalman filter; (2) The proposed driver monitoring and alert system produce on average a 52% improvement in time to collision (TTC), 54% improvement in reaction distance (RD), and an overall 26% reduction in collision rate as compared to similar tests without the LED warning.