Publication

Knowledge about normal glance behaviour and typical stress and fatigue levels amongst city bus drivers is very sparse. We therefore conducted an exploratory pre-study with 15 participants during an actual shift in real traffic with passengers. The aim was to gain knowledge about stress, fatigue and glance behaviour during normal operation of a bus, with the subsequent goal to gather data to facilitate upcoming work on driver state detection algorithms targeting the transfer of control between the driver and an autonomous bus. Data collected during the trials include eye tracking, physiology (electrocardiogram, electrooculogram), subjective ratings (sleepiness and stress) and video (driver and road ahead). Lessons learned includes that driving a bus in an urban environment requires frequent sampling of peripheral visual information (why one-camera eye trackers will not work, and why road centre-based distraction detection algorithms will fail) and that physiological data requires personalised algorithms. Regarding the bus drivers’ working situation, fatigue and stress levels were generally low, but increased levels of stress and sleepiness existed even in an exploratory experiment like this without any manipulation.