Change in Heart Rate Variability Indexes due to high driving workload in turning left at the intersection in real road environment

The paper intends to investigate the changes of Heart Rate Variability (HRV) indexes of healthy drivers while driving on a real urban road environment in order to excavate the variation of drivers' driving workload when turning left.Electrocardiograph (ECG) was recorded continuously while drivers driving on a familiar road.The data from three drives were collected for analyzing every fifty minutes.We mainly analyzed the RMSSD, PNN50 and LF/HF of HRV in time-frequency domain which reflects the activity of autonomic nerve and sympathetic nerve.The HRV was extracted from the ECG signal de-noised and filtered.The results show that RMSSD, PNN50 and LF/HF of the driver obviously increased when turning left on the urban road.This reflects that drivers' HRV will be changed significantly with the heavier visual workload.Our findings indicate that physiological signals can provide a metric of driver stress in future cars capable of physiological monitoring.