Evaluation of the Driver's Mental Workload by Conversational Form based on Facial Skin Thermal Image Analysis

Abstract

Lots of traffic accidents are related in physiological and psychological state of the driver. Therefore, physiological and/or psychological measurement of a driver is important for prevention of a traffic accident. The aim of this study is to quantitatively evaluate the amount of mental workloads by Facial Skin Thermal image (FST), which is thermal image of the human face. A measurement of physiological and psychological state of the driver who is under mentally workloaded during driving task was conducted. The evaluation method for physiological index, which were FST, Electroencephalogram (EEG), Electrocardiogram (ECG), based on the correlations among those indexes was considered. A result of present experiment, an efficiency of FST in evaluation of a mental working load of a driver was shown.