Effect of Static Magnetic Field of Electric Vehicles on Driving Performance and on Neuro-Psychological Cognitive Functions.

Yaqing He,Yuk-Tak Chow,Weinong Sun,Peter Sai-Wing Leung

doi:10.3390/ijerph16183382

Abstract

Human neuropsychological reactions and brain activities when driving electric vehicles (EVs) are considered as an issue for traffic and public safety purposes; this paper examined the effect of the static magnetic field (SMF) derived from EVs. A lane change task was adopted to evaluate the driving performance; and the driving reaction time test and the reaction time test were adopted to evaluate the variation of the neuro-psychological cognitive functions. Both the sham and the real exposure conditions were performed with a 350 μT localized SMF in this study; 17 student subjects were enrolled in this single-blind experiment. Electroencephalographs (EEGs) of the subjects were adopted and recorded during the experiment as an indicator of the brain activity for the variations of the driving performance and of the cognitive functions. Results of this study have indicated that the impact of the given SMF on both the human driving performance and the cognitive functions are not considerable; and that there is a correlation between beta sub-band of the EEGs and the human reaction time in the analysis

Highlights

With the exponential increase in popularity of electric vehicles (EVs) in transportation, the electromagnetic fields (EMFs) of EVs have aroused increasingly public concerns
This paper investigates the effect of static magnetic fields (SMF) of EVs on driving performance as well as on cognitive functions
Wilcoxon signed rank-sum test was applied for the Lane Change Task (LCT) and Reaction Time (RT) results (LCT: W = 55, p = 0.33; RT: W = 39.5, p = 0.15), while paired t-test was applied for the driving reaction time (DRT) result (t = 0.30, p = 0.77)

Summary

Introduction

With the exponential increase in popularity of electric vehicles (EVs) in transportation, the electromagnetic fields (EMFs) of EVs have aroused increasingly public concerns. EMFs [2,3,6,9], static magnetic fields (SMF) (including DC scenarios) [8,9], or synthesized scenarios of above two, have been evaluated by both measurements and computational simulations. EMFs are in general in compliance with the basic restriction values of international standards [1,2,6], some EMFs levels in the scenarios in which the other parameters are in compliance with the basic restrictions may exceed the reference limits, threatening the safety of human health in EVs [3,4]. The reference limits are well established by the International Commission on Non-Ionizing

Methods

Results

Conclusion