Shed a light in fatigue detection with near-infrared spectroscopy during long-lasting driving

Fatigue driving is one of the leading roles to induce traffic accident and injury, which urgently desires a novel technique to monitor the fatigue level at driving. Functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is capable of noninvasive monitoring brain-activities-related hemodynamic responses. Here, we developed a fINRS imager and setup a classic psychological experiment to trigger visual divided attention which varied responding to driving fatigue, and attempted to record the drive-fatigue-level correlated hemodynamic response in the prefrontal cortex. 7 volunteers were recruited to take 7 hours driving and the experimental test was repeated every 1 hour and 8 times in total. The hemodynamic response were extracted and graphed with pseudo image. The analysis on the relationship between the fNIRS-measured hemodynamic response and fatigue level finally displayed that the oxyhemoglobin concentration in one channel of left prefrontal lobe increased with driving duration in significant correlation. And the spatial pattern of hemodynamic response in the prefrontal lobe varied with driving duration as well. The findings indicated the potential of fNIRSmeasured hemodynamic index in some sensitive spot of prefrontal lobe as a driving fatigue indicator and the promising use of fNIRS in traffic safety field.