Mental State and Driving Performance

Resumen

The automatic evaluation of mental state/emotions during driving constitutes a powerful tool for assessing the risk of accidents. It is known that about 97 % of accidents in Mexico during 2021 were related to human causes, while 95 % of such causes were attributable to drivers. In this work, we use encephalographic and cardiographic tools to asses the emotions and the state of mind of drivers during a virtual tour of city driving conditions. Two different traffic and pedestrian crossing conditions were used for the same city path. Our results arouse that significant differences between low- and high-traffic conditions are present in drivers dependent mainly on driver experience. Experienced drivers, irrespective of their gender, are considerably more robust to face the variations in traffic measured in both their biometric data and vehicle dynamics performance. The results of this work may help assess the feasibility of deriving customizable driving assistance systems that take into account the emotions of driving.