Influence of Time Pressure on Driver’s Response Time under Stressed Conditions

Abstract

The present study attempts to understand the driver’s mental state during driving due to the imposed time pressure and prevailing traffic condition based on heart-related physiological features. A Gaussian mix model-based clustering approach was adopted in this work to classify the developed stress on three distinct levels: low, medium, and high. Further, this study applied a defuzzification methodology to transform the fuzzy representation of probability values for each sample in a crisp dataset to develop a stress index. The developed stress index is crucial for alerting the driver regarding their mental state for avoiding any risky driving behavior under stressed conditions. Finally, the current work proposed a sliding window methodology for determining the response time of the driver to any significant stress level change and investigated the characteristic of the calculated driver-specific response time which will be sensitive to driving duration based on stress level and time pressure condition.