Abstract
Pavement ride quality testing has traditionally been based on subjective questionnaire ratings. The questionnaire survey has ability to directly measure the sense of road users' ride quality. However, it is difficult to quantify the evaluation results based on the questionnaire due to its lack of objectivity. This study examines pavement health monitoring method using physiological information such as heart rate variability (HRV) for detecting mental stress of road users toward pavement ride quality. First, a results of a driving simulator experiment shows that potential mental stress caused by road roughness can be observed in high-frequency oscillations in 0.15-0.4Hz of HRV processed by continuous wavelet transform. Then, the high-frequency oscillations of HRV is summarized as an index related to the mental stress that makes objective ride quality evaluation possible. Finally, this study indicates that the index contributes to improve the accuracy of pavement health monitoring based on surface ride quality.
