Abstract
Half of all road accidents result from either lack of driver attention or from maintaining insufficient separation between vehicles. Collision from the rear, in particular, has been identified as the most common class of accident in the UK, and its influencing factors have been widely studied for many years. Rear-mounted stop lamps, illuminated when braking, are the primary mechanism to alert following drivers to the need to reduce speed or brake. This paper develops a novel brain response approach to measuring subject reaction to different brake light designs. A variety of off-the-shelf brake light assemblies are tested in a physical simulated driving environment to assess the cognitive reaction times of 22 subjects. Eight pairs of LED-based and two pairs of incandescent bulb-based brake light assemblies are used and electroencephalogram (EEG) data recorded. Channel Pz is utilised to extract the P3 component evoked during the decision making process that occurs in the brain when a participant decides to lift their foot from the accelerator and depress the brake. EEG analysis shows that both incandescent bulb-based lights are statistically slower to evoke cognitive responses than all tested LED-based lights. Between the LED designs, differences are evident, but not statistically significant, attributed to the significant amount of movement artifact in the EEG signal.
Highlights
According to the World Health Organisation, road traffic injury is a top-ten leading cause of death worldwide across all age groups [1]
This study investigated EEG analysis of brake lights based on conventional bulbs and newer LED designs
P3 components were analysed from channel Pz for 22 subjects with ten different brake light assemblies, and analysed for statistical differences in terms of the latency of the cognitive component from the brake light onset
Summary
According to the World Health Organisation, road traffic injury is a top-ten leading cause of death worldwide across all age groups [1]. Rear-end collisions are mostly attributed to either delayed brake response or lack of braking force due to slower reaction times, when a following driver does not react quickly enough to the behaviour of a lead vehicle, due to inadequate or late detection of its deceleration [3]. Researchers have examined methods of alerting drivers to avoid rear-end crashes through improved technology either inside or outside the vehicle [4]–[8]. A majority of traffic safety studies incorporate driver reaction time (RT) in their analysis models of driver behaviour, related to imminent collisions [9]. RT usually represents the time duration measured from the appearance of a stimuli
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