On the Correlation Between Heart Rate and Driving Style in Real Driving Scenarios

Abstract

[EN] Driving safety is of utmost importance in our society. The number of fatalities due to car accidents is still very high, and reducing this trend requires as much attention as possible. There are situations where the emotional conditions of drivers vary due to reasons beyond their control, or because they decide to change their driving style. Hence, we consider that such frequent situations deserve more scrutiny. In this work we addressed such issues by designing an Android application able to monitor in real-time both physiological data from the driver and diagnostic data from the vehicle (this data is obtained using an OBD-II connector) to study their correlation. Among the various non-invasive biomedical sensors available nowadays, we have adopted heart rate sensors, either packaged in belts or in smart watches. This allows studying the relationship between driving aggressiveness and heart rate. For our analysis we focused on fourteen different routes accounting a total driving time of 6 hours and 2 minutes, which we have split into three separate categories: urban, suburban, and highway routes. We analyzed the correlation between the heart rate and the driving style for each of the three groups. Our experiments show that the differences in terms of heart rate between quiet and aggressive behavior range between 2.5 % and 3 % beats per minute higher for the latter behaviour compared to the former.