A portable device for real time drowsiness detection using novel active dry electrode system

Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals give important information about the vigilance states of a subject. Therefore, this study constructs a real-time EEG-based system for detecting a drowsy driver. The proposed system uses a novel six channels active dry electrode system to acquire EEG non-invasively. In addition, it uses a TMS320VC5510 DSP chip as the algorithm processor, and a MSP430F149 chip as a controller to achieve a real-time portable system. This study implements stationary wavelet transform to extract two features of EEG signal: integral of EEG and zero crossings as the input to a back propagation neural network for vigilance states classification. This system can discriminate alertness and drowsiness in real-time. The accuracy of the system is 79.1% for alertness and 90.91% for drowsiness states. When the system detects drowsiness, it will warn drivers by using a vibrator and a beeper.