Driver's Mental Workload Monitoring by Unobtrusive Textile Electrodes on the Wheel

Road traffic accidents attributed to fatigue and drowsiness of drivers remain a major global safety concern, requiring the development of unobtrusive monitoring systems. This paper presents a comparative analysis of a novel contact-based sensing system designed to monitor driver mental workload using silver-based textile electrodes integrated into a steering wheel. Unlike traditional Ag/AgCl finger electrodes, which can interfere with the driving task, the proposed textile sensor offers an unobtrusive and long-term tolerable alternative. Experiments were conducted using a high-fidelity driving simulator with seven subjects to compare the textile system's performance against a reference unit (ProComp Infiniti). Due to motion artifacts inherent in manual steering, frequency-domain analysis of Skin Conductance (SC) signals was employed. Results demonstrate that the prototype textile-based system provides Power Spectral Density (PSD) distributions nearly identical to the reference system. Specifically, the 0.25 Hz to 0.4 Hz sub-band was identified as a stable and sensitive band for identifying stress induced by driving. These findings, though preliminary, confirm the viability of silver-based textile electrodes for real-world automotive driver monitoring applications.